


West - Life as We Know It

by shaenie



Series: West [4]
Category: LoTR RPS - AU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-10-02
Updated: 2010-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:54:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 31,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie





	1. Debts: Lando, outside Tucson, 1876

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=westlando2-1.jpg)

Lando tracks the Marshall to Tucson.

It isn't difficult. The Marshall's Office keeps its records easily accessible. Finding out where he ranges and where he is based is easy.

Lando is still hurt, still hurting, ribs and right arm especially. His arm is no longer bound to his body, though, and he can use it. It aches almost all the time, and it is worse at night. Nights are cold in the desert and the temperature aggravates the unhealed injuries that are more than three months old.

Or perhaps they are only two months old, since the night in Yuma, the night in Cate's whorehouse. The original wounds, yes, he had sustained those just over three months ago. But he had done enough damage to himself that night at Cate's - a full month _after_ the original injuries(beating) - reopening those wounds so efficiently that they could almost be counted as their own, separate injuries.

Doesn't matter. The wounds are old and the wounds still hurt, but Lando cannot wait to do this.

He cannot leave this undone, although Cate had almost begged him -- and she is not the begging sort -- to stay just a few more weeks. He suspects that she had some idea of what he meant to do, though they had never spoken of it. He cannot live with himself while this is undone, though. Not any more.

There had been three broken ribs, his broken right arm (broken in three places), broken nose (merely an annoyance on top of everything else), and most importantly, most dangerously, there had been something broken inside. Something that had him coughing up blood for the first week after he had sustained the injuries, something which the doctor had monitored with a frenzied devotion that had left Lando a bit bemused and Cate white-faced with strain.

That had been three months ago. Those had been injuries inflicted on him.

He hadn't died that night, although he is reasonably certain that Bill had wanted him dead. He is reasonably certain that Bill had come there to kill him, intending to kill him (he had read that on Bill's face, read death in Bill's eyes), but Bill had not. For whatever reason. Lando had been too hurt to try to read things in Bill's face by the time Bill had stopped.

A month later, still unhealed (and his arm had still been bound to his body then, though he hadn't coughed up blood in a while), he had killed a man on the floor of Cate's saloon. Brody.

He avoids thinking of his reasons.

It is enough to know that he had undone what healing he had managed to achieve, had undone it so spectacularly that he had coughed up blood for better than three weeks that time, and he had died at Bill's hands in his dreams every night, and felt grateful for it.

But he had lived. Again.

And since he is still alive, he has to find this man, this Marshall. When Lando finds him, he means to kill him.

* * *

In Tucson, he is Ruben del Acero. He is a range-rider, ragged and dusty, with a tawny deerskin duster and a creased and worn Stetson. No one questions his name or his origin. He speaks with a heavy Mexican accent.

He eschews pistols, still, but carries a sawed off shotgun that commands enough respect that no one questions him about it.

Lando has occasionally 'been' Mexican before, but this persona is new. This identity is new.

He falls into it almost gratefully, as he watches and waits.

Lando dreams of Bill the first two nights in Tucson (in one of the dreams, Bill is somehow a rattlesnake, his strike a reaction to pain and fury, and when he wakes up he knows this is true, it's accurate - though presented in typical dreamlike logic - because what Bill had done to him _had_ been _reaction_ rather than action, _reaction_ to what the lying Federal Marshall had _told_ him, and maybe Lando had already known that, maybe that was why Lando was out hunting _him_ and not Bill - or maybe it didn't matter, maybe he would never hunt Bill no matter what, he doesn't know), and on the third night he dreams of the Marshall.

He has never seen the man, but he knows it is him, in the dream. It is the Marshall, but he wears Brody's face, and he is dead, eyes staring sightless into the night sky where stars burn like foxfire.

He wakes with a cry, arms flailing, and knocks over the lamp on the bedside table. The lamp shatters. The fire is small and he puts it out in moments, and then opens the window to air out the smell of lamp oil and smoke. He leans out, and the moon is huge and round, as pale as Cate's perfect skin, and its position looks somehow precarious in the sky.

 _The moon is falling_ , he thinks. _The sky is falling._ He wonders if he is going insane.

Lando never thinks the Marshall's name, and pretends he isn't aware of this

* * *

Lando smells dirty law on the man thirty feet away. He sees the bartender wince when he walks into the saloon; sees the faces of several men go either dark or pale. He sees one of the saloon girls flee behind the bar with eyes like a mouse, and the bartender talks quietly to her for long seconds in a low, soothing tone.

Lando is at a full table, playing cards with only half his attention. There is a girl behind him (he thinks her name is Meg, and she reminds him a little of Liv, all dark chestnut hair and wide, laughing eyes), running her fingernails lightly down the back of his neck. It takes work not to tense. He does not want her to feel it, does not want her reaction to give anything away about him.

The man is wearing a Federal Marshall's badge, star-in-circle, prominently displayed, and for a moment Lando sees him dead in the starlight, sees it in his mind. His belly twists with a combination of disgust and fury, and he keeps his face still. The Marshall scans the room, and his eyes stutter when they reach Lando -- _clumsy,_ Lando thinks, but isn't surprised, as men that use badges for power often forget that not everyone will bend to their symbol -- and then move around the rest of the room in a leisurely fashion.

Lando lets himself look at the man for several seconds. He just came in, after all. Everyone is looking. He has descriptions, and this man matches them. He is excessively pretty for a lawman. Pretty and prissy, from his pocket watch down to his spats.

The pistols are Colt Single Actions, however -- Peacemakers -- and their butts are well worn, gripped in plain, dark wood (cherry, Lando thinks, and if he still carried a gun he might covet them, as he knew _Bill_ would covet them), smooth and fine. That they are fine guns means little. More telling is that they are fine guns, but undecorated by etchings (a lack of vanity Lando finds faintly surprising, considering the man's manner of dress), and show signs of wear.

Lando's eyes tell him that those guns have been used.

The Marshall circulates, and for a time, Lando doesn't look at him. He plays cards, and feels the man's eyes on his skin.

A man - especially a lawman - who dresses like that (spiffy, is what they call it back east, Lando thinks, and dandy is what they call it here) had better be able to take care of himself, and Lando thinks this man can. It is in the way he projects easy grace and control, though he is tight, tense, and it is in the faces of those he passes near, in their shifting, glittering eyes.

Lando deliberately does not watch this. He is deliberately oblivious, letting his gaze wander over the Marshall without interest occasionally, though he is not sure how successful he is. He has never had to do this before. Never like this.

He supposes he will become better with practice, and he supposes he will get practice. Lando has hovered near the line of the law many times. He has crossed it once or twice. But that line is fuzzy here, in the not- state of Arizona. Lando likes the Territories for that very reason. It is one of the myriad things he learned to like from Bill.

But he is not unclear about this. There is no fuzziness to this line. Once he crosses it, he will never be able to go back again, he will forever be on the opposite side. Reasons do no matter, justification matters even less. There is no way to soften it. If he kills this man, it will dog him forever.

But.

He looks at this man and sees Bills empty face in the moonlight, sees the shape of this man's name on Bill's lips, sharp glitter of hatefearfury in Bill's eyes, and there are some things Lando is still willing to give up everything for. Even if nobody but Lando ever knows it.

The man isn't patient enough to wait for a seat to open at Lando's table. Lando can smell his curiosity, his interest, and the man really is clumsy, how the hell had he managed to catch Bills? Bill should have eaten this man for supper, bon apetit.

Lando curls a lazy smirk onto his lips as the man drops a hand onto the shoulder of the player opposite Lando, and squeezes lightly. He doesn't say anything, but it isn't subtlety. There is nothing subtle about him, no matter how much death his Peacemakers have seen.

The gambler rises to his feet without collecting his money, and just moves away, doesn't look, just bellies up to the bar and orders a whiskey in a hoarse but steady voice. The bartender obliges him with a blank expression that does nothing to conceal his tension and expectation.

Lando feels neither tension nor expectation.

Nothing is going to happen here.

Here and now, they will play cards, they will watch each other and measure each other, and that is all.

"Buenas noches, Marshall," Lando drawls thickly, and smirks a little wider as the other players at the table look at him like he is insane, a collective gasp hovering on their lips, but unvoiced.

"Good evening, yourself," the Marshall replies, and smiles, bright and handsome.

They play cards.

* * *

Lando wins (in spite of the Marshall's fairly adept cheating), and he sees that this is all it will take.

He doesn't know if he is gratified or disappointed.

He does know that feeling contempt for the man is dangerous. Letting himself feel cocky is dangerous.

This man somehow bettered William Boyd, Lando reminds himself. It is a feat that he knows he is not capable of himself, and thus an effective reminder.

The Marshall will follow him, when he leaves. The Marshall's face it easier to read than Bill's ever had been, by far.

* * *

Lando is fine until the man grates out: "I know you."

The words are wet and garbled and grating all at once. He is speaking through blood and broken teeth.

It would have stopped him only for a moment, he would have continued on with his mind still unconnected to his fists, except the man then adds: "You're the kid. You're Boyd's stray."

Something like clarity or reality or rationality falls into Lando's mind so quickly, so brutally, that he staggers back from the man, who had gone to his knees on the ground in front of Lando an unknown number of blows before. He retreats, unable to help it, and his hands go to his head, bloody fingers winding into the curls closest to his scalp and gripping there, _holdingclenchingpulling,_ as if to keep his mind still, keep it intact.

The man lurches to his feet, and Lando can only watch him in sudden frozen uncertainty, because what is he _doing,_ what the _hell_ is he doing? This will not fix it, will not fix Bill or fix Lando or fix the two of them together.

"You're just like him," the man rumbles (there is a deep, whining sound in his chest when he breathes, and the pain in Lando's ribs flares up, white-hot and present, because he knows, knows that he has broken the man's ribs as Bill had broken Lando's ribs). "He went white like that when I mentioned you, too." And he laughs.

And uncertainty is banished, melts away like sugar in the rain, and all that is left is crystalline rage, so sharply clear, so bitterly cold, that Lando feels like ice has formed around his brain.

The laugh, that laugh, he cannot live another second hearing that laugh, not after the pain of Bill's eyes - dead and empty - on Lando as his fist smashed into Lando's face, not after the not-pain in Bill's face, the inability to even feel pain, Lando thinks, and this man did that, this man caused it, he is to blame, he is responsible and he must be held accountable for that.

He recognizes bloodlust when he tastes it on his tongue and in his throat and feels it surging like heated and sensual tides in his mind. He recognizes it, sees it clearly, long enough to see the way out of it. Long enough to see that he can still back away from it, even as it swirls around him.

He does not.

There are debts here. This man owes a debt.

And Lando owes debts of his own. He had never betrayed Bill - not in the way that Bill believes that he had - but Lando understands that in some way, he _had._ In pride and in resentment, Lando had played a part in this, helped create it. Lando owes Bill. Debts of grief and guilt, because it could not have happened that way if he had not left Bill there. If he had not been hurt and humiliated and furious, if he had not forgotten what he _owed_ Bill, it could never have happened. He has his own debts, yes.

And now is the time for them both to pay.

* * *

When it is done, and Federal Marshall Karl Urban is dead and there is blood on Lando's hands (and in his mouth, too, because he has bitten down on his own tongue to keep from screaming or sobbing or puking), it occurs to Lando that he is on the road to Hell.

He doesn't know when he set foot on it, but it feels familiar enough that he guesses he's been on it for some time now.

He sees his mother's face, hears her voice (her English accent, beloved from her lips, hated from his own) as he had heard it every night of his childhood, reading passages from the bible in a low, soothing tone. He sees her eyes, enormous and dark and gentle, eyes that he inherited from her. Their eyes no longer see the same things, he thinks. He doubts they look the same anymore, either. The things you do, the things you see, they mark you. They show in your eyes, and Lando wonders if his eyes are as dead as (Bill's) those of other killers he has known.

Lando is on the road to Hell, and when his mother is gone, she will go to Heaven, and Lando has no hope of ever meeting her there.

Urban and Brody will wait for him there, and Bills walks the road beside Lando, though he is not with Lando. Not anymore. Lando thinks he can almost see Bill there, though, squinting at him from the shadows, the gleam of metal low on his hips, eyes as green as moss on stagnant (dead) water.

Lando isn't afraid of Hell. He is not surprised to discover this, hunkered down on his heels next to a dead man in the Arizona badlands. The world in the shroud of pre-dawn is as bleak as his own interior landscape, as empty and dull and void.

He isn't afraid of Hell, even with the company he'll keep there. That company is already with him, haunting the vaults of his mind, echoing in the hollows within his chest and skull, dwelling in places emptied, places in which bits of Orlando Bloom had once lived, parts of him that are dead and gone, if not _long_ gone.

Lando does not know how to miss those parts of himself.

He is not afraid of Hell.

It will only be a change of scenery, after all.

And probably not much of a change, at that.

 


	2. Lost: Reuben/Lando, 1876

He loses himself after Tucson.

He lays down his cards and backs away from the table, and for a while there is a dirty, silent stranger living in his skin, a sharp eyed vaquero with a short fuse and a shotgun that he never fires, but which he isn't averse to using as a club. He takes jobs of questionable legality, but with a certain moral necessity; he spends at least one night a week violently.

More if he can get it.

He doesn't think and he doesn't wonder, and it's the first time in years that he doesn't think of Bills on a regular basis (though there are still dreams).

The name he uses becomes his in a way Julien La Fleur had only after more than a year of familiarity that required almost constant attention. This one is easier, quicker, more _his own_ than Julien had ever been. It becomes his by dint of necessity, the absolute requirement that he recognize it whispered by a comrade -- not a friend, he doesn't _have_ friends -- in arms, or screamed out in warning, or in rage.

He becomes known, in certain circles. He gains a reputation as the man to go to for things no one else will do. He becomes admired for doing whatever it takes to succeed.

He becomes feared, and not just by the people he sets his sights on. Those that hire him talk softly, carefully. They don't meet his eyes, and they are grateful, yes, when he succeeds, but they pay him and get him away as fast as they can.

He has no patience with idiocy, and he won't abide being lied to. God help the man who hires him under pretense. He's only has to prove it twice, and he doesn't have to kill anyone to do it. Nevertheless, word gets around.

He spends time in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California. He takes only one job before he moves on, inevitably hunted, but it's easy to lose himself out here, where there is nothing for so many miles, no one to ask questions, no one to witness his haunted sleep.

He dreams of Urban sometimes, but Urban is a stranger, and he only occasionally loses sleep over him. He dreams more often of someone more familiar, and wakes raw and bleeding in his mind. He learns to be still, he learns to push things aside and away.

Rarely, he wakes from nightmares with the phantom feel of cool hands gripping his arms, his shoulders, the soft-warm memory of a comforting weight behind them. Sometimes awakening is accompanied by the ghosts of a soft voice, throaty with sleep and concern, calling him by a name he doesn't use anymore.

The first time he wakes so, he's in Laredo, so deep into the scrubland of tiny, struggling homesteads that he's forgotten what it feels like to be safe and warm, and that day he breaks a man's arm for slapping a child, disregarding the fact that the man was the child's father, and he feels no remorse. And they still pay him, when he finishes. Oh, yes.

He hates and loves those dreams in equal measure. His waking mind has pushed aside the need for comfort, succor, and he does not want to remember it. He doesn't want to remember anything.

He does the impossible, but he doesn't dream about the things he does now.

Kidnappers in Jackson and bandits in Camryville and those are only the jobs he takes openly, those are the ones he gets in the street or the town square, the ones that he finds out about through posted notices and editorials in local newspapers, the ones he sometimes gets letters about, addressed by last name only, left in saloons of the sort that he frequents, delivered by white-lipped barbacks or unsteady ranch-hands, usually without words.

Can you find my daughter? She was taken by bandits.

Can you find out who's poisoning my cattle?

Can you stop the horse rustlers that come out of the badlands?

Can you save us?

Can you?

He can, and he does, and some part of him, a distant, dry voice that sounds like someone he knew once, someone he doesn't think about, whispers that he isn't trying to save anyone but himself.

He ignores it. What does it matter if it's true? What else can he do? What else is he good for?

There are others that he takes that aren't so straight-forward, things that come to him strictly through word of mouth, sometimes from someone who knows someone who has a friend who needs something.

Things that can't be posted, can't be _known_ , but which satisfy him on some level.

Someone once told him that what was right wasn't always what was legal.

He comes to understand that intimately.

He meets others; not friends, but something like kindred. Men like him, and even a couple of women.

There are more of them than he ever would have imagined.

It isn't good, but it's easy.

It's so much easier.

It can't last, of course.

Nothing ever does.


	3. Charity: Elijah, Cate, Yuma, 1877

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=westlijah.jpg)

 

It's late afternoon, and hotter than hell. Cate can't decide which is better: to stay in the house, which is at least shady but where the air is thick and still with sullen heat, or to go out onto the porch, where there is occasionally the faintest stirring of a breeze but where the sun hammers harshly into every corner and crevice. In the end, she settles on inside, since the heat makes her head ache a little less than the light does.

She's carrying a handkerchief that she uses to blot the sweat off her upper lip and – more surreptitiously – the nape of her neck. There is, however, absolutely nothing she can do about the molten droplets tickling their way down her spine.

She goes into the back kitchen. There's a large wicker basket on the table, its lid thrown back, exposing several stoneware and glass jars, a couple of bottles, and half a dozen paper-wrapped parcels from one of Yuma's general stores. Cate scans the basket's contents, then flips the lid closed and does up the leather strap that secures it.

She's been sending a little help in the way of food and linen for the last few months; she only wishes there was something more she could do, but it's becoming apparent that Deborah is going to be beyond anyone's aid soon enough.

Cate's lips compress into a thin line.

Deborah's been good to Cate. She was working in the house when Cate took over, and far from resenting the new Madam, Deborah had been generous with her knowledge of Yuma and its men – which ones could be trusted to use a woman decent, which ones would pay for something a bit more, which ones the whores hated to see crossing the threshold. In return, Cate left in place the existing, highly irregular arrangement whereby Deborah's teenage son was living in the house but contributing nothing of value.

Elijah, small and slender and smooth-cheeked, looks younger than his years. Cate easily forgets that he's not a child.

The fiction is always made easier by the strangely asexual way he hangs on the girls, spending his time curled on the parlor couches with them, half-hidden in their skirts, his small pale fingers toying with ribbons or curls with equal abstraction.

When Deborah left the house a little over a year ago – her own decision, for Cate values her wisdom and her friendship enough to overlook her fading appeal – Elijah went with her, though Cate half-expected him to stay. He's had enough offers from customers to know he could set up shop in his mother's old room any time he wanted. To the best of Cate's knowledge, though, whatever fucking Elijah submits to is done in alleyways and backrooms and he gets nothing for his trouble but bruises and a look of cindery satisfaction in his magnificent eyes.

Cate has never let herself name, let alone examine, the feeling she had when he left with Deborah. But if she had been able to describe it, anyone else could have told her: she was relieved.

The hinges give a rusty creak when Elijah swings the kitchen door open, setting his teeth on edge. It isn't as if he's sneaking in, of course. Cate's expecting him; but it suits Elijah to go in the back way, and the quicker and quieter this business can be accomplished, so much the better.

She's there waiting for him, polite smile in place. "Hello, Elijah."

"Hello, Miss Cate." Elijah shifts uncomfortably, suddenly aware of his bedraggled state standing in sharp contrast to the neatly turned out kitchen. Like Cate, (whose only concession to the heat seems to be a damp and lovely flush) it doesn't have a pin out of place, and Elijah tries to wipe his dusty hands on his shirt-tail. They both know why he's here, of course, but it's never easy, these few moments before Elijah can collect Cate's charity. The rules must be followed, the appropriate things said, and Elijah hates it, because there is no answer to how is your mother? that he can bear to say.

Cate looks at him, and Elijah can't read her, he never can, but he knows she's taking in his unwashed dungarees and the shadows under his eyes, and he straightens his spine. He hasn't slept properly in days, catching no more than two scant hours in a row as his mother brings up blood in coarse, wet crackles, but he isn't going to admit that. The basket is on the table where it always is, waiting, and Elijah knows it will be heavy. He tries not to look at it, choosing instead a point on the wall above Cate's right shoulder where pickled beets sit on a shelf, purple-red and thick, and the silence hangs in the heat.

There's a moment, as there is every time Cate sees Elijah, when her heart hurts and she draws breath to tell him to come back, to come home, because that's how she is … compassion is like a sickness with her.

Then she recollects herself, and the words die unsaid. She tells herself it's because Deborah doesn't want Elijah in Cate's house, that Deborah doesn't want her son living that life. But the truth is, it's because Elijah's sky blue eyes have an angry edge to them that closes up Cate's heart.

"Are you doing all right?" she asks, and her voice is stone cold even to her own ears.

Elijah, who's been staring past her, drags his gaze back to her face. His top lip curls a little.

"Yeah. Fine."

Cate represses a sigh of frustration.

"Well, you let me know if there's anything in particular your mother needs … or you."

Elijah shrugs, like that's not even worth gracing with an answer. Cate hesitates, then produces the silver dollar she brought down specifically to give to Elijah.

"Here. In case you think of something you do need."

She holds the coin out to him between her fingers, and Elijah tips his head slightly to one side, as if he's considering the worthiness of the gift. At last, he reaches out and Cate lets the coin slip from her hand into his. Elijah's fingers close tight round the shining circle.

" … thanks … " he murmurs, his gaze dropping away from hers.

Cate presses her lips together, her mood shading all too easily into annoyance.

The coin is cool in his palm, not at all like Cate's been holding it, and Elijah wonders, strangely, if Cate's skin is cool to the touch. Not that he's interested like that, of course not; it's just that it strikes him as odd, given the thin sheen of sweat her subtle efforts with the handkerchief can't conceal . It would be fitting if her skin were cool, as cool as her demeanor, which Elijah can tell is rapidly becoming frosty.

It's his own fault, he knows. He should be more grateful for the coin, grateful for the jars of love and worry neatly packaged and waiting for him to take to his mother. And for his mother's sake, he is.

But Elijah's never caught the trick of expressing thanks so that the bitterness is hidden. He wishes that he didn't need this bit of silver that Cate's given him, but the truth is that he does. He needs to get more medicine from the chemist, and Mr. Northam's tinctures don't come cheap. Wishes, too, that he could find some other way to pay for it, but the only other options that come to mind are even less appealing and don't bear serious consideration.

At least not yet.

Most of all, Elijah wishes that none of this was necessary, and that he was going home to find his mother rolling out dough for his favorite chicken pot pie, humming a bit of Fur Elise, her cheeks soft and full like the smooth pastry.

Wish'n one hand and shit'n th'other an' see which one fills up first, he'd heard a drunk cowboy say one night in Cate's parlor. As sayings go, Elijah thinks that one makes an awful lot of sense. He reaches out for the basket with his left hand, anxious suddenly for this to be over with.

"I'll tell ma you asked after her," Elijah says, lifting the basket, and it's as heavy as he'd known it would be. Cate is never cheap.

"You do that."

The rules have been followed, and Elijah doesn't linger. The door squeaks again as he pushes his way outside, but this time the sound is weaker, diffident protest. Elijah doesn't look back at Cate, not sure whether he'd see pity or irritation in her eyes. Better not to know. He just concentrates on keeping his spine straight as he walks away.


	4. Chasing the Tables, Lando/Julien, San Francisco (mostly)

[   
](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=rumpledjuliencropped-1.jpg)

 

The first time he has to run because of Urban, it's a Tuesday during the first week of February in 1877. It's a little over seven months since Tucson, and Ruben has just finished a job in Barstow. Southern California reminds him comfortably of southern Arizona, and less comfortably of west Texas, and his dreams have been especially vivid for the last fortnight, both the good and the bad. He is hollow-eyed and restless, and Ruben's compañeros are losing patience and losing sleep, and if he doesn't do something about it soon, one of them will quiet him in the night with a knife, like as not.

He knows by now that he'd been stupid. He's come across the wanted posters a handful of times, so he knows that Urban's partner is after him, and it would've taken nothing in the handful of days immediately following Tucson to have reinvented himself, discarded Ruben Del Acero, and taken up some other bloke with similar characteristics but a different name. All this might've been avoided entirely.

He was stupid, and he knows it, but he hadn't been thinking then, not in any way he knows how to describe. _Lando_ had been virtually absent after Tucson, and it just never crossed his mind.

And now it's far too late for that. Ruben is too well known, his face and his appearance too easily recognized, and another name isn't near enough to uncreate him.

It's Tall Jimmy that brings the first poster into camp, wadded into a ball and stuffed into his saddlebag, tosses it at Lando like an accusation.

Lando isn't even that surprised to see it. It almost feels like he'd expected it.

He rides out of Barstow on a surly pinto, north and west through Bakersfield, then heads cross country to San Lucas, where he trades the pinto for cash and trades Ruben for Lando for the first time in long months.

It takes him three days to switch back to English on a consistent basis, and longer than that to find his real accent again. During that time, he manages not to speak to anyone that might remember him. He's a mish-mash of men, and he needs to be just one. And that one is not Lando himself. He needs someone more memorable, but for the right reason, the bright and flashy, but ultimately unimportant reasons.

He needs Julien, but he knows there's no… no bridge between Ruben and Julien, he cannot merely slide from one to the other, and so he is Lando for a few days, or at least he _looks_ more like Lando than like either of the others, but really he's not any of them, or all of them; he mutters to himself in French in assorted saloons and hostel rooms, trying to get the feel of him again, trying to overturn Ruben's thoughts and habits of the last few months, trying to remember what it's like to smile in that particular combination of facial movements that Julien uses, the bright smirk, the arched brow, all laced with faint boredom, as though it's a jest, and not necessarily a very good one.

He takes a coach to Soledad and shaves and cuts his hair in a cheap hostel right next door to the train station, hunched over to make use of the cloudy glass backing the washstand, and using one of a pair of straight razors he'd won playing poker by firelight just outside of Silver City, New Mexico. He thinks it helps, but he has to stare at himself for a long time before he starts to look familiar to himself again. He hasn't seen Lando's face in so long. He knows that Billy would recognize him, should their paths cross now, but there's nothing to be done about it. He needs the difference in appearance that the short hair gives him, and if it's shorter than Julien normally wears it, it'll just have to do. The next morning he stops in a clothing store and buys a ready-made suit that's close enough to his size, changes in the back room of the shop, and abandons Ruben's filthy clothing in the bin in the alley behind the shop.

He sells the shotgun to the bloke behind the bar at the saloon on the corner, and uses the money to get on the train to Santa Cruz, because it's faster and he's tired, he's so bloody tired.

He has no real idea where he's going, but he's in a hurry to get there.

He stays in Santa Cruz for going on two weeks, playing the tables until he's holding far and away better than he ever had with Bills.

He uses Julien -- though he doesn't look like Julien exactly until he's been there a day or two and managed to do some more shopping (Julien carries handkerchiefs, he reminds himself, Julien wears cologne and won't drink the water anywhere, Julien owns not one but _two_ fancy cigarette cases and carries a pocket watch, and he has to get it right, he has to know all of this, because in those in-between moments, Julien tries to slip away from him, and without him there's no one, not even Ruben) -- and within a week he's receiving invitations to private games, the sort that are held in the parlors of gentlemen of means, and he's remembering to answer to his name, recalling what it's like to have women want to cosset him and men want to pound him on the back in camaraderie (and, in a few cases, what he suspects wants to be more than simple camaraderie). He remembers how to laugh, and he remembers how to win. God, he remembers how to win.

It's easier than he expects to mingle with them; it's harder than he expects to win just enough to make money. He's got better without ever noticing. Without much caring.

On the thirteenth day, passing by the Post Office, he sees another poster.

He winds up his affairs as quickly as he can -- Ruben lighting out on a moments notice is nothing out of the ordinary, but Julien doing so would be passing unusual and reason for comment -- but it takes a couple of days anyhow, and on the evening before he takes the train to San Francisco, he sees Hugo Weaving ride into town.

Somehow, some way, he does not panic and flee. He has no idea how. He supposes it's another thing he can lay at Billy's door. He boards the train precisely as planned the next morning.

Anything else would draw too much attention.

San Francisco is big enough to disappear in, but he doesn't want to disappear. For one, there's no reason on earth (he tells himself) for Weaving to connect Julien La Fleur with Ruben del Acero. The two aren't even remotely similar.

But mostly, he doesn't want to disappear because that would be a suspicious thing for Julien La Fleur to do. There's no reason for Weaving to connect Julien and Ruben, but if Julien starts doing things that don't make sense, Weaving might very well choose to try and figure out why. Especially if whatever information he's going on is running dry. And since Lando has been Julien for weeks now, Weaving must be running short on actual information about Ruben's whereabouts. It's possible that he's just hitting every good-sized city or township that could conceivably fall along Ruben's path. It's even likely that that's what he's doing.

Better to remain who he is, to remain visible and distinctive unto himself, undeniably Julien, undeniably a drawling French aristocrat, arrogant and self-absorbed and as unlike Ruben as is silk to burlap.

He finds a semi-respectable boarding house, neither a saloon nor a whorehouse, but one with a proprietress (Miss Langtry, a slender lady of middle years with tired eyes but a warm manner) that seems inclined to allow him to come and go as he will as long as he is presentable any time he comes in or goes out, and doesn't mind tidying after himself. Miss Langtry looks him over with a kind of resigned patience, and tells him that she doesn't allow guns -- Lando assures her that he has none -- and if he wants to "entertain" he should do it someplace else. Julien's charm is coming back to him, and it doesn't take much gentle gallantry to make her smile, though the wary recognition in her eyes never fully retreats.

Nevertheless, Lando is confident that they'll get on well together, as he has no intention of trying her patience.

He spends his first evening in town merely strolling along the boardwalks fronting the businesses, and by full dark he finds himself passing in front of saloon after saloon, small, crowded shanty pubs and large, open 'parlors' filled with sharp-eyed ladies that watch him measuringly as he passes. Something he discovers here that he's never seen before are the gaming halls, the gambling houses, places set aside for nothing other than that one thing, the thing that he does better than anything else, and he almost forgets about Urban and Weaving, almost forgets about Ruben entirely, and even Lando retreats into the dusty back-passages of his brain because Julien is not, of course, surprised by any of this. It's something he would know, even if it's not a thing Lando had ever been able to really imagine -- though he had known _of_ them, Billy's unparalleled education once again standing him in good stead. Julien doesn’t even hesitate. He stops in front of the first one he comes to that's clean enough to suit him -- his standards aren't actually that high, but Lando figures Julien'd be at least as fastidious as Lando's mum -- and looks inside over the saloon style batwing doors. The sign out front proclaims it to be _Julianne_ ' _s_ in great, curling script.

He decides it's a sign, and pushes inside, his eyes already gleaming as he takes in the tables and the cards, the girls and the men, gambling men like him (or like Julien, anyhow, they're rather higher class than Lando for the most part), barely anyone glancing up at his entrance (unlike the small towns he's gone through, where everything stops when he enters and he knows everyone will remember him), perfectly anonymous in his well-cut hosepipe trousers and his tailored coat. He takes off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair to tousle some of the curl into evidence, and there's a lovely young lady at his elbow already, inquiring as to his well-being, ready to take his hat and make sure he's got a drink to hand.

Excitement flares in his belly as he looks at her, and around the room, and then at her again, something that's not unlike arousal, warm and sharp enough to make the back of his neck prickle.

This he hasn't done, not like this, but he is beyond certain that it's what he should be doing, perhaps what he should have been doing all along. This precise atmosphere, half-decadent, perhaps, but wholly focused on this one particular thing, _his_ one particular talent.

He will do well he. He knows it, he can, as Billy might have said, almost _smell_ it.

And he's happy to lose himself in it for a little while, as consciousness-altering as any drug or drink, the mad buzz of it, the adrenaline and the triumph, and he leaves San Francisco -- after nearly two months of doing nothing but making Julien _real_ ;, making him a flesh and blood man, recognizable by a wide array of his peers, making him _knowable_ ; -- with seven-thousand dollars on his person and another fifteen set up in a bank account under his real name.

He leaves because he is winning too much, he leaves because he needs to establish Julien as a circuit player, he leaves because of the way Julianne looks at him, but mostly he leaves because he _itches_ , because he catches himself _thinking_ the occasional word in French, and because he senses that Lando becomes less real the longer he stays.

And when he finds himself following the cards all the way to Arizona, he cannot pretend he's surprised.


	5. Comfort: Elijah, Harry, Yuma, late 1877

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=westlijah.jpg)

Elijah can hear the whore's voices inside, whispering his name between elaborate gales of laughter meant to entice and lure, the cheer of male voices mingling with them to feed into the nightly hum of the whorehouse. The sound is achingly familiar, and would be comforting were it not missing the most important sound of them all. She'd had a warm laugh, a warmer voice, and Elijah would come when she called, always. Tonight he stays outside, shielded from the wind only by the convenient nook of the cluttered alley.

But the cold is even more biting on an empty stomach and Elijah finds he can't quite make a fist around the neck of the near-empty bottle in his hand, its glass cold and no longer welcoming. He lets it clatter onto the dust, immediately forgotten, and flexes his hand, numbed by liquor and cold and grief. He has to find a place to sleep tonight, someplace other than home and other than Cate's. He's sure she'd find a place to tuck him in for a few nights but Elijah knows the beds are few and needed. He could go home while he still has one but there would be one empty bed too many and while Elijah is usually not too picky regarding sleeping arrangements, this is one situation he isn't prepared to face. Sleeping under the stars is tempting, but ridiculous, and something in the back of his brain knows this.

If he admits it to himself, what he really wants is the generous folds of a skirt to bury his face in and close his eyes, but he knows he can't have that either. Not how he wants it. And so he starts walking, feet not as agile as he would like them, ground uneven under him. The cold bites at his face and the wind stings his eyes; it would make them water but he's all cried out for the day. The year. Forever. No one needs to know.

Harry's place is hard to miss, even if you're not looking for it. Elijah doesn't know what he's going to ask, but he's heard Sinclair could provide anything for pretty eyes and a price. Maybe one out of two would get him somewhere, if only for the night.

Harry answers his own door. He keeps a man during daylight hours, but he doesn't like having someone else in the house at night. It makes him nervous.

For a second he just looks at the kid. He is skinny and shivering, and his eyes are enormous, like huge blue lamps looking out of his pale face, reflecting moonlight. Eerie. Then he turns his head, his lips pressed tight together, and looks down the empty street. Harry sees that he is small, but not a child, and after a moment, recognition comes.

That whore's kid. The one from Cate's that had died a few days ago. Consumption. She'd been one of Harry's favorites, before illness had stolen her looks. She had been older than he generally liked, but like this kid, she had been gorgeous, all white skin and big eyes, like a doll. And she had worn her age well, until she'd got sick. Towards the end she'd looked like a poorly made toy, all transparent skin stretched over bones like twigs, thin and skeletal. Harry had barely been able to look at her. Still, he'd let her stay in the house she'd rented until she died.

He'd forgotten about the kid.

The kid looks at him again, eyes still lamp-like, but Harry is looking at his face now, the small chin, pink bow of soft, young lips, the cheekbones. He's a damned pretty kid.

Harry guesses he knows why he's here.

"I was sorry to hear about your ma, boy," he says, which is true enough, in its way. "Come on in here. Get out of the cold."

He smells the kid as he walks by, booze and no bath in a probably week. Harry frowns, but when the kid (what the hell is his goddamned name, Harry can't remember to save his life) turns back around to face him, he forgets about that for the moment.

In the light, he's even prettier. His eyes are red rimmed and swimming with grief and need and hopelessness.

Harry's body stirs; it doesn't much surprise him. The first thing to do is get him clean and fed. Then they'd just see where it went.

Harry smiles at him, and -- tentatively, like he's not sure he's supposed to -- the kid smiles back. "Remind me of your name, boy. I've got a rusty sieve for a memory."

"Elijah Wood. You -- you knew my mother."

His voice is weak and rough; he hasn't spoken since sometime yesterday morning, maybe, possibly, and he thinks it might've been to Cate, whom he's never really needed to tell anything to because she already knows, piercing eyes settling on him in either scorn or fond exasperation. In the past week her hand on his arm had been softer, like his mother's would've been.

Elijah knows the polite thing to do is to shake Mr. Sinclair's hand, but he's looking at the imposing man before him, dressed impeccably even at this time of night, and all he can remember is how he'd paw at his mother, large hands everywhere, possessive. She always had a saucy smile for him and a submissive cock of her head; Elijah had inadvertently seen them in her room once, a handful of years ago, and the image of his moving body towering over her and wringing almost-painful whimpers from her had burned itself into Elijah's mind.

He looks up at Harry's face, head tilted up to mimic what he remembers of his mother's mannerisms. "I need a place to stay."

Harry just nods at that. He'd been expecting it. He slides a hand around Elijah's waist, presses at the small of his back to get him moving.

"You need a bath," he says, and Elijah starts under his hand, but doesn't refute it. "And you need food." Elijah's stomach growls in answer, and Harry doesn't smile. "And then we can talk some business, you and I."

He leads Elijah to the kitchen first, sits him down at the table and feeds him leftover chicken and greens from supper, both still warm enough to do without the oven. He watches the kid tear into it with his fingers (he wonders when he'd last eaten, wonders if his ribs and hipbones and collarbones will be clearly visible under all that smooth, young skin) before pointedly sliding a fork closer to him on the countertop.

Elijah hesitates, eyes going from the fork to Harry's face, and then back again. Then he wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, and reaches for the fork. Harry intercepts the hand, pressing a napkin into it, and sees a flush flood the kid's cheeks (his lips are shiny with grease from the chicken, and Harry watches as a quick pink tongue slides out, licks the grease away). Elijah's hands are unsteady as he shakes out the napkin and uses it to wipe his hands and mouth. Then he picks up the fork.

"I'll leave you to it while I get a bath ready. You can sleep here tonight. It's too late to find you a place of your own." Harry waits until Elijah meets his eyes, gives him a nod. His cheeks are still tinged pink. He is pretty, yes, so pretty, and Harry observes the tentative look in his eyes and the slightly deferential dip of his head with satisfaction.

They can do business. Harry is sure of it.

The food weighs like gold in his gut, warming him from inside, filling -- for a brief moment -- what has been feeling empty. He puts the fork back down and bites into a chicken leg with hands and teeth. It's as much tactile as it is gustatory, and Elijah doesn't stop until there's nothing left on his plate. The cotton of the napkin is thick and heavy against his mouth and fingers. Elijah doesn't know why he ate this man's food and wouldn't touch Cate's, Cate with her sharp sense of charity and her strained smile. His stomach clenches at the thought and he thinks he might be sick. He pushes away from the table and stumbles out of his chair and into the hallway.

From the bottom of the stairs he can hear the muffled sounds of water splashing against metal. For a moment he considers leaving -- the door is right there -- but the warmth of the house and the comfort of good food has already began taking its toll on him and he feels tired, so tired. He'd give anything for an anonymous mattress to lay his head on. The thought of warm water brings goose bumps to his skin and he climbs the stairs, one by one, and none of them creak under his slight weight. When he finds Harry again, the man is kneeling by a copper tub, sleeves rolled halfway up his arms.

Harry hears him come in, though the kid is as quiet as a mouse. "Peel out of those clothes," he says without turning around. The water is tepid, not really warm, but Harry isn't carrying another bucket of water up the stairs. The kid has no idea that he's getting the royal treatment as it is, but that's all right. He'll understand it soon enough.

He sets out soap and a cloth to wash with before he realizes that Elijah is standing still, hasn't moved to take off his clothes.

He looks over his shoulder at Elijah.

The kid is looking back intently, not blushing (as Harry had half expected), just looking. His eyes shine with more knowledge than he has any right to (though he _is_ a whore's son, what the hell had he expected?). "You shy or something?" Harry asks, though he already knows the answer.

Not shy, something else. Harry arches one brow upward and waits.

Elijah feels the telltale tingle in his gut, the tightening in his crotch; Harry Sinclair is a handsome man, tall and strong, older... Elijah knows what he wants, and knows he can give it and get what he wants in return. This is what's important, he reminds himself, and waits him out.

"Where am I sleeping?" Not shy, not that. But his benefactor is not the only one who can do business. Elijah tone is not wary, but firm. Best to iron out the details before it's too late.

Elijah walks to Harry, walks to him until he's standing by him, towering absurdly over his crouched figure. Elijah undoes the buttons of his grimy shirt, slowly. "I want to know where I'm sleeping. I'll need a place to stay that's not my mother's house. You can have that back."

Harry's lips quirk into a smile against his will.

He's a brave little bastard; Harry will give him that.

He rises to his feet, using his height to his advantage. Elijah doesn't look away, precisely, but he doesn't exactly maintain eye contact either. Instead, he keeps his face pointed toward Harry's chest, peering up through girl-thick lashes, glitter of blue shielded but not entirely concealed. Heat twists in Harry's belly. This kid, this almost-man, knows exactly what he's doing. Harry is nearly sure of it.

He's not sure if he's disappointed or approving until Elijah shrugs the shirt off of his shoulders, graceful and purposeful, and reveals a pale chest, surprisingly dark little nipples, and just the very tops of sharp, prominent hipbones peeking out from above the waist of his trousers. Elijah's ribs are visible, but not too prominent. His collarbones are an entirely different matter. For long moments, Harry can't take his eyes off them.

When he manages to direct his attention back to Elijah's face, finally, Elijah is watching him. His face is solemn, considering, but that need is still shining out of his eyes. Harry thinks that need is for more than just a place to stay, but that doesn't really matter. Whether Elijah needs it or not, wants it or not, Harry is pretty sure he's willing to give it.

"I own two of the three hostels and boarding houses in this city, Elijah. I own seventeen houses in town. I own 6 ranches outside town."

He reaches for Elijah's trousers, and Elijah doesn't move to stop him. He makes short work of the buttons, and crouches to skin them down the kid's legs. He tugs Elijah's boots off, and then the trousers as well. Elijah steps out of them without comment.

He doesn't look at all embarrassed when Harry stands up again -- though he's standing there in his drawers with a fairly obvious erection -- so Harry takes his time looking.

"If you want a place to stay, then you'll sleep here tonight. Tomorrow, we'll find you something else." Elijah is looking at him again, calculating, and Harry is impressed almost against his will. It's clear the kid wants to be sure he won't be getting nothing but overnight accommodations for what he's going to be giving. Good business sense, although it's getting a little old. "I'm not a cheat, Elijah," he says. "I said we'll come to an arrangement, and we will. Tonight, this is the arrangement. Tomorrow, we'll work out the details."

He watches Elijah think about this, and while patience is not normally his strong suit, he's not finding it particularly difficult at the moment. He can wait, when the result is worthwhile.

He thinks he will find the result of this rewarding, indeed.

Elijah considers Harry a moment more then nods, breaking the intense eye contact to push the remaining garments down his hips. They pool weightlessly at his feet and he steps out of them to climb into the copper tub, eyeing Harry discreetly.

He doesn't trust the man and wants this to be purely business, but he can't hide the effect Harry's touch has had on him so far. The barely concealed looks of appraisal only serve to kindle Elijah's now-evident arousal. He feels something else emerging, something that feels a lot like hostility or confidence or both, whatever he thinks might be needed to make it now that Debbie's gone. Elijah finds this is easy, to lend himself to someone in exchange for the things he needs. If it's this easy, he might make it after all. He will.

He fights a small, private smile and keeps his expression neutral, even tries for blank innocence. He stands in the tub like he remembers doing for his mother many years ago, waiting for Harry's hands.

Harry isn't a man who is easily surprised.

Nevertheless, Elijah has surprised him twice in the last hour or so. The first time, it had been mild, maybe more like wonder that the kid was so self-possessed, seemed to understand so clearly what he was doing.

The second is right now, right this minute, standing calf-deep in tepid water and gazing at Harry with those eyes, bizarrely innocent and jaded at once, just waiting.

Waiting for Harry to wash him.

Harry's hands twitch involuntarily, and yeah, he wants to wash the kid. Wants to soap him up, feel that pale, taut skin under his hands. Touch.

Touch everywhere.

But he doesn't like the idea that Elijah is so certain of things, doesn't like that he's so certain. Being predictable is a good way to get taken advantage of. Being seen as predictable is being seen as weak. Being seen as weak is not good business.

Being manipulated by this boy-man is not good business. Not for any reason.

"Going to wash some time today?" he says, a little sneer in his voice, and he's had lots of practice at keeping his face cold, making his eyes glitter. It's not difficult, not even with his cock mostly hard in his pants. He will wash Elijah, sometime. He likes the idea of it, likes the idea of him naked and wet and slick with soap under Harry's hands, shivering a little with cold.

He'll scrub him, sometime, until Elijah's skin is pink and smarting.

Sometime when it's his own idea, and not Elijah's. Sometime after the cocky little bastard comes to understand that it isn't his place to set the tone of their association.

There is a faint flush on the kid's face again, and that is better, more as it should be. Harry leans back against the doorframe and crosses his arms over his chest to watch.

Elijah recognizes well enough when a table is turned on him and he has the decency to blush at the embarrassment; but he doesn't falter. If he can't get this tonight, he sure as hell will get a real, honest to God bath, watched or not.

He breaks eye contact and lowers himself into the water, all senses suddenly occupied by this simple action. The water is barely warm, yet Elijah's skin tingles, reddening, as if coming alive at the contact. The smell is that of unwashed flesh and dust, along with something a little bit like Liv's perfume. Elijah closes his eyes and listens to the sound of sloshes and drips, of water clinging, then sliding off him until he's got his back to the slight incline of the tub.

He starts shivering, goose bumps rising again on his arms, and he wraps them around himself, bony knees coming up out of the water like pale islands. Recklessly, he wills himself to forget about Harry, about the arousal that has left him as fast as it had come, about the churning of his stomach, the dizziness in his mind, the fright in his bones. He leans forward and rests his forehead against his knees.

Surprise number three: Now the little bastard is crying.

He's doing it quietly, almost soundlessly, but he's shaking and the muscles of his back and shoulders are bunched and shifting with tension.

Harry isn't sure if he wants to sigh or shout.

He has never aspired to be a gentle man. Things don't come to the meek and the kind, and Harry isn't interested in being sympathetic or compassionate. He isn't interested in 'inheriting the earth,' because he has what he wants of the earth right here, and he likes things just this way.

On the other hand, there is a crying kid in his bath tub (a kid which, incidentally, Harry has near-future plans for), and while he doesn't necessarily like to think of himself as kind, or even as decent most days, he feels a little bad for Elijah.

An unwelcome spark of sympathy to be sure, but there, like it or not. He would have half-suspected manipulation on Elijah's part, except no one cries like he is crying to manipulate, people don't cry like this until it's either cry or scream or shoot yourself in the head.

Harry has only cried once in his life, and it wasn't like this, but that doesn't mean he can't recognize it.

He likes to begin things as he means them to continue. It eliminates complications further down the road if folks understand from the very beginning what Harry expects from them, and what he is prepared to give them in return. He is generous with money when it will get him what he wants, and he is equally generous with his authority, his standing in Yuma. He backs the people that help him out, he uses his business skills and his money and his name to add weight to theirs, and it usually works out for him.

In this case, however, he can see fairly clearly that Elijah is going to be a useless wreck for the rest of the goddamned night if Harry doesn't do _something_ , and that will put a definite crimp in his plans.

He sighs silently and tells himself that this isn't any different than being good to your horse. You do it because a well-treated animal will always work harder for you than a poorly treated animal will. You do it because a good horse, properly cared for, gentled, will let you ride it into the ground without complaint.

That thought makes him smile slightly.

He grabs a thick towel and murmurs, "Come on, Elijah. Let's get you into bed where it's warm."

Elijah doesn't look up (hiding his tears, and Harry approves) but he doesn't resist when Harry lifts him under the arms (he doesn't weigh hardly anything at all) and he stands on his own two feet, shivering, while Harry rubs him down. He does it briskly, business-like, nearly exactly like he'd rub down his horse, and after a minute, Elijah's shivering subsides.

Elijah stands still, limbs loose, and lets himself be toweled off none too gently, the hard angles of Harry's hands somehow comforting under thick, expensive material and Elijah likes the feel of that, could get used to it.

He steps out of the tub when Harry's hands urge him to, and turns his gaze up to him. Elijah wishes his eyes didn't sting, his throat didn't clench, his cheeks didn't burn. He also wishes he didn't want to touch Harry so much, reminds himself he needs to keep it together; this is too important to get lost in what he _wants_. He tells himself he doesn't, he doesn't care about this man at all, he doesn't, but the nearness does him in every time; the smell of a man, sweat under leather, unperfumed, raw -- he squeezes his eyes shut for a second, then opens them and peers at Harry, making his eyes and his body language inviting (he hopes).

He reaches out of the towel wrapped around him and touches Harry's shirt with soft fingertips. "I'm tired." Which he is, but that's not what he's saying, and he knows Harry knows. Sometimes the game is easier to play when everyone knows the rules.

Elijah looking up at him with doe-eyes, gentle and inviting (the fact that they are tinged with understanding, that Elijah clearly knows exactly what it is he is doing, somehow makes it even better, Harry isn't sure why) is much better, even if Elijah does still look like he half wants to cry.

There isn't any need to say anything, so he doesn't. Elijah moves along when Harry urges him forward with one hand between his shoulder blades, on top of the towel still, though Harry doesn't think Elijah would object (doubts he would even be surprised) if Harry tugged the towel down and away, discarded it so he could feel the warm, smooth skin of Elijah's back.

He doesn't, because he won't have to wait much longer for that, so it's no hardship to leave it until he maneuvers Elijah into the bedroom.

He is faintly amused at the look on Elijah's face as he takes in Harry's bedroom. Of course, the kid doesn't see things like this every day. He's used to the little house he had lived in with his mother, which, while neat and clean, was by no means fancy. He's used to the rooms at Cate's, maybe, which are richer than the normal for Yuma, but still more utilitarian than this, lacking in this kind of luxury.

Harry indulges him, lets him run his eyes over the deep, rich wood of the furniture, the velvet hangings on the bed, the size of the bed itself (Harry is a large man, and appreciates being able to sprawl in comfort). He goes to work on his own clothing, and is gratified when Elijah turns to watch him instead.

"Make yourself comfortable," he says as he sheds his shirt, and for a moment, Elijah doesn't move, just stares at Harry's chest, his vibrant eyes gone dark and wanting. Not an innocent, this boy-man, and Harry is glad. Innocence is inconvenient at times like these. "There's brandy on the bedside, if you want it." Usually he offers the liquor to relax his 'guests', but Elijah doesn't need relaxing. He isn't nervous -- not about the sex, anyhow. But he's still shivering a little, in spite of the fire in the grate. "It might warm you up a bit."

"I'm not cold," Elijah denies softly, and licks at his lips. He shrugs, and the towel slides down off his shoulders. He doesn't catch it, and it puddles around his naked feet on the carpet. Harry is no stranger to beauty (he buys it all the time), but it's still sufficient to make him look long enough to call it staring, still makes him breathe just a little more quickly.

Elijah may very well be the prettiest man Harry has ever seen. In spite of the softness in his face, the youth, and in spite of the fact that he hasn't entirely left boyhood behind, it's impossible to think of him as anything but fully grown once his cock is visible, hard and proud, curving upward toward his belly. He knows how pretty he is, too, Harry is sure. Elijah turns slightly (displaying), and the yellow light flickers on his skin, casting cunning shadows.

"Then pour me a glass," Harry says, and goes to work on his trousers. He should be irritated with the way his hands are clumsy, too busy itching to be on Elijah's skin to be deft and responsive to Harry's instructions, but he isn't. He barely notices.

His mind is on Elijah, like his eyes, and he isn't noticing much else.

Elijah walks to the bedside table and takes deliberate care in pouring the liquor, finding his fingers less dexterous than hoped. He suddenly remembers his thirst for alcohol as of late and instead of tearing up again he downs the glass he just poured, putting it down a bit too hard on the polished wood. The expensive liquor burns down his throat and warms him inside but makes the second glass -- Harry's -- harder to pour.

He turns back to Harry with the drink and waits, this time truly unsure what is expected of him. He'd step forward and hand Harry his drink before sucking him off, but suddenly the rulebook is in gibberish, while it was perfectly clear -- like he'd written it himself -- a minute ago.

"What do you want?" he asks, hoping the direct question might get a direct answer, one he could work with even with the buzzing in his brain and the too-tight grip on the glass tumbler.

It's a simple enough question, and there's no reason it should make Harry fiercely aware of the ache of his too-hard cock (which Elijah has deliberately not looked at). It isn't the question, Harry guesses. It's what's behind it.

It's the offer. The open-ended offer. Open-ended and unqualified.

It's made from need, not desire. Or not entirely from desire (although it is clear that there is at least some desire from the state of Elijah's cock, which Harry doesn't bother to avoid looking at). Harry doesn't bother to suppress the thrill of it. Perverse, probably, but he's grown accustomed to his own perversions. They don't bother him.

He takes the glass from Elijah's hand (which is remarkably steady, considering that Harry can see the shivers still traveling the length of Elijah's lithe little body), and downs the contents in several long swallows.

Elijah is watching him, and even with all that raw and aching need on his face, even with the alcohol burning in his cheeks, there is something like calculation in his eyes. Harry admires it, while simultaneously wanting to evict it.

For a moment, he wonders at the wisdom of this. He is not a man of high passion; it doesn't suit the analytical bent of his mind. It's bad for business. But the moment is fleeting. He's also not a man who denies himself the things that he wants.

He closes the gap between them with three long and purposeful strides. His hand rises (it seems to want to rove over that pretty face, perhaps slide a thumb along the angle of that jaw, but Harry redirects it to a shoulder instead), and he pushes Elijah back two steps. Elijah's thighs strike the bed, and he sits down abruptly. His eyes are wide with something that is _like_ surprise, but which Harry is sure is not.

Prey. Elijah looks like prey, like a victim. He is the very picture of helpless innocence, and it is appealing, and matters not at all that it's a lie.

"I want to taste your skin," Harry murmurs, and watches the said skin flush (but not with shame, Harry is sure), watches those amazing eyes darken to the color of twilight skies.

Elijah leans back, elbows braced on the mattress, and slithers (yes, that is the word, as sleek and sinuous as a snake) backward, pulling with elbows, pushing with bare heels. Harry doesn't know how he manages to make such a movement slow and smooth and provocative -- by any reckoning, it should look awkward -- but he does.

When Harry leans in Elijah arches up toward him (and his eyes never leave Harry's face, and there is something about that open-eyed wanting that makes Harry burn bright and hot). When Harry darts his tongue out to taste the sharp ridge of Elijah's collarbone, he hisses pleasure (the not-innocent emerging, strong and certain) and winds his arms up and around Harry's neck with surprising strength.

Elijah feels like he's being drawn to Harry's body like a magnet, rising up to meet it at the slightest touch. There is nothing between Harry's skin and his own this time, and the contact shakes Elijah, rattles something loose and he just clings, crushes it to him, wants to feel warm lips on him, large hands both erasing and stoking the ache, setting skin ablaze.

The contrast is shocking (deep-down cold to burning touch) and Elijah whimpers against Harry's hair, smelling cologne and sweat and getting harder still because of it. His thighs part automatically under Harry's body and each deliberate swipe of tongue jerks his hips upward. Elijah shivers at the warm friction, but what makes his mind go blank momentarily is the thick erection against his thigh, and he knows he wants it now as much as he didn't want to look at it earlier because he knew he'd want it; it's a good thing he did, too, because he doesn't feel like he can conduct any kind of business now, except this. He wants to suck it, to fuck himself on it, to just touch and look, doesn't matter, as long as he can have it.

Harry moves up to cover Elijah, listens to him moan plaintively at the feel of Harry's cock against his stomach.

He's not much of a kisser, normally, but Elijah is making sounds, tiny, breathless whimper-sounds, and the idea of tasting them has somehow become a priority in Harry's brain. He licks at Elijah's neck as he slides up Elijah's body, and Elijah writhes under him, pressing up, hips jerking up against him, and Harry feels himself shaking with want. He had been thinking of Elijah as a whore, thinking of him as someone who used his body to get what he wanted, but that isn't quite right. It's half right, maybe, it's not completely wrong, anyhow, but it's _more_ than that. Elijah may be bargaining with his body to get what he wants, but that doesn't change the fact that Elijah _does_ want, and what he is doing now (whimpering, panting against Harry's skin, back arched up off the bed, hips rocking, thigh pressed up tight to Harry's cock) is in no way feigned. This is not the paid ardor of a whore. This is real, and the fact it's disguised as necessity doesn't change that.

"Elijah," he growls (surprised to hear himself do it), and Elijah's head goes back, eyes still wide open, and when Harry kisses him, he groans into Harry's mouth, whole body tremblingly tense under Harry's. He tastes of the brandy he had just downed and faintly of chicken, and his mouth is somehow hot and fierce and frantic, and also soft and pliant and submissive. He rakes his hands up Elijah's ribs (and Elijah wriggles engagingly, gasping into Harry's mouth) and lets his hands roam over Elijah's face, the sharp angle of his jaw, twining fingers into tufts of hair.

It isn't enough, Elijah naked and whimpering under him isn't enough, and Harry wonders (not without some trepidation) what _would_ be enough. He slides a hand down Elijah's body and curls it around his cock. Elijah whines, high and needy, and pushes his cock into Harry's hand, hips jerking, and he's pretty sure that Elijah's thigh, pressing up even harder against Harry's cock, is deliberate, purposeful.

He has to break away from Elijah's mouth just to breathe, and as soon as he does, Elijah's mouth latches onto his neck, slickwet and biting, licking, hot. He's done this before, of course, Harry hadn't ever doubted that, but Jesus Christ, he's too young to be this good at it.

Elijah whimpermoans at the full-bodied shudder shooting through him when Harry's hand wraps around him and he bites Harry's lips, bites Harry's neck and needs more, now, more please, please.

He lets go for a fraction of a moment, pushes away just enough to turn over, turn onto his stomach under Harry, feeling Harry's body accommodating the new position with a grunt, cock heavy against Elijah's ass.

"Please..." he hears himself beg and hates himself for it, wants to take it back but wants Harry in him even more so he leaves it out there. The linen under his nose smells obscenely clean and Elijah's fingers curl into it, his hips rise above it to meet and plead and ignite.

He is pressing up and into Harry, body simultaneously yielding and shiveringly tense. Harry can't breathe without smelling him, musky with sweat and arousal, the stinging smell of alcohol, and the heated skin under his body, against his cock, is smooth and sleek and straining.

Harry keeps something slick in the bed stand, something to ease such things, but he can't quite bring himself to move away and get it.

"Elijah," he says, and hears the note of warning in his own voice. He thinks it might be too late for that warning, though, he thinks maybe he waited too long to give it. If Elijah pulls away now, he isn't sure he can pull back.

It's moot, anyhow. Elijah doesn't pull away, he pushes up harder.

Harry spits into his hand and slicks up the head of his cock and pauses to take a few deep breaths. He is positioned, ready, but he feels a little like he's burning up from the inside, and it wouldn't do to explode on the first stroke.

He has a reputation, after all.

"Elijah," he says again, and presses, and he doesn't mean to be rough, doesn't have any particular desire to make it harsh, but Elijah is pushing back nearly as hard as Harry is pushing forward, and it is quick, abrupt, he is in.

Elijah makes a tiny, pained sound, a choked _'ah!'_ but he doesn't pull away, and Harry can't stop. Elijah is hot, hot under his hands and around his cock, and he wraps his hands around Elijah's wrists, feeling them bird-thin and seemingly brittle, and presses forward until he is all the way in, buried in silky-tight heat. "God," he says, and Elijah is already moving, like he doesn't need to adjust or possibly doesn't care about adjusting. He is twisting and Harry's rumbling growl seems to encourage him to push back harder.

"Yessssss," Elijah whines, and that is it, that is all Harry can take.

His hips jerk forward hard as he lets the rest of his body press Elijah down into the mattress, pinning him tight beneath his body, his cock deeply buried in Elijah's body. Restraint just isn't possible, and Harry doesn't give a damn.

Elijah's breathing is labored, hitched by both the pain (searing and splitting, and something dark inside Elijah knows that's the way it should be, no more than he deserves) and Harry's weight pinning him down onto the mattress. He can barely move now, body crushed, wrists bound, heart pounding in his ears. But he wants, and he's not getting, not quite; Harry isn't moving, is just grunting against Elijah's neck, hands on Elijah's wrists flexing like his thighs straddling Elijah's.

"Mr.-- Mr. Sinclair. Please--"

His tone lacks the respect the formality would imply, and to incite further Elijah spreads his legs as best as he can, pushing his knees up for leverage, to allow breath and access to his cock. But his movements are awkward and useless, and Elijah cries out loudly at a sharp thrust, letting it erase whatever else had been lingering on his mind before Harry touched him.

Harry doesn't bother trying to hold back. Pacing himself at this point would be foolishness. Elijah is tight and squirmingly active beneath him, his breathing short, sharp gasps of need, and the kid's motivations no longer seem important.

He pulls back enough to give Elijah room to breathe, and Elijah immediately pushes himself back, lithe muscles bunching and straining. He is utterly shameless, without reserve in a way even the most stunningly successful prostitutes of Harry's acquaintance are not, and Harry responds, his hips jerking forward hard, his hands tightening around Elijah's wrists. The sounds struggling from his mouth are raw and honest, perhaps the only honesty Elijah has given him tonight.

"H... harder," Elijah babbles hoarsely, words broken and tumbling over one another. "Yes, hard, now please oh please..."

Harry doesn't hesitate in giving him what he's asking for, tasting sweat-slick skin beneath his tongue, Elijah's musk heavy in his nostrils, listening to Elijah grinding out words interspersed with more feral sounds, almost animalistic. His slim hips twist and slam back into Harry, and this is easily the most forceful Harry has ever allowed himself to be, and Elijah is keening, breathy and urgent, not complaining in the slightest.

He reaches around and fists Elijah's slick, jerking cock in his hand, and Elijah stiffens, ass suddenly tightening unbearably around Harry's cock. He hears himself growling, at least as animalistic as Elijah, and his hips jerk forward, and the sounds falling from Elijah's lips escalate, move upward in pitch and urgency, and then he is shuddering and twisting around Harry's cock.

Harry can't breathe, it is too hot, and he's coming before he is quite ready, before he realizes it is happening, shuddering hard, jerking and spilling into Elijah's willing, writhing body.

Elijah's arms give out, flatten him to the mattress under Harry, breath erratic, mouth parched from panting, throat hoarse from screaming. His fingers hurt from clutching at the bedspread. He whimpers when Harry yanks his hand from under him, leaving his spent cock to leak desolately against Elijah's stomach.

Another cry when Harry withdraws, and Elijah slumps down completely, too dizzy to move for a moment, unable to catch his breath. Then Harry is off and Elijah is cold, suddenly, and doesn't want to be. He rolls onto his back and pries his eyes open, lets damp strands of his hair stick to his face, lets the sweat sting his eyes. Harry looks back, face unreadable.

A beat or two, and Elijah is scrambling backwards, muscles screaming to wait a little more, but claustrophobia is closing in and he needs out, right now, before... before. This is new, but Elijah can't help it, finds himself on his feet on the other side of the bed before he can even think it through.

Harry thinks of letting him go, but only for a moment. He doesn't even have to get off the bed to slide an arm around Elijah's waist (once off the bed, he had frozen, chest heaving with panicky breaths, but it wouldn't have mattered -- Harry had locked the door when they had come into his bedroom) and jerk him back down.

Elijah spits and hisses, all wildcat panic and flailing limbs. Oddly enough, he doesn't calm until Harry has slid mostly on top of him to pin him more effectively. Once Harry is securely on top of him, he simply goes limp and relaxed, all warm, soft skin and slightly parted lips. His eyes are closed, but not clenched closed, just not open. Harry waits until Elijah's breathing starts to calm slightly before he says anything.

"Where are you going to go, Elijah?" he asks, not unkindly. Elijah opens his eyes and looks up at him, gaze unmistakably calmer now, though wary. "You stay with me now. That's why you came here, isn't it? Tonight you stay with me, and tomorrow I find you a place of your own." Elijah says nothing, but cuts his eyes away, looking somewhere past Harry's shoulder.

"Besides," Harry says, voice going a little harder, "you don't want to go. Not really." He runs his hands down Elijah's sides, the prominent curves of his ribs, and closes his hands around Elijah's hips, thumbs curved over sharp hipbones. He pulls Elijah's cock into alignment with his own, and is completely unsurprised to find him in the same state Harry is in: not entirely hard, but certainly nowhere near soft, either. "You're young. You've got more stamina than that."

He arches his hips a little, and Elijah bites at his lower lip, but still says nothing.

"You want me to fuck you again, Elijah," Harry breathes, and instead of stiffening, embarrassed or indignant, Elijah just closes his eyes. Harry can feel Elijah's cock twitching, nearly fully hard. "You want to suck my cock."

No response. No verbal response.

But Elijah licks his lips nervously, and Harry laughs. Elijah flushes, pretty pink on his pale, pale skin. He still doesn't speak, though, and Harry is becoming slightly impatient with him. He moves as if to pull away, roll off of Elijah, and only then does Elijah do something.

"No!" spills from his lips, like he didn't mean to say it but couldn't quite stop it. His arms go up around Harry's neck, not enough force to really hold him, if Harry were determined to move (which he isn't, he likes the feel of Elijah's slim frame trapped beneath him), but enough to make it very clear he doesn't want Harry to get off of him.

That was when Elijah had bolted before, Harry realizes, and he thinks he is beginning to see a clearer picture of Elijah. He had bolted when Harry had moved away, when he had drawn back and left Elijah alone and sweaty and without contact.

"Then tell me," Harry says steadily. "Tell me you want to stay. Tell me what you want, Elijah, or get the hell out. But if you leave, you can't come back."

The idea of being back out there in the cold nearly shocks Elijah physically and he reaches up to curl his fingers into Harry's shoulder, the grip of bitten-off nails ineffectual.

"I- I want to stay," he murmurs, hoarse. "Please."

His mind is clearing -- either from the threat or the hardness of Harry's body back on him, he's not sure which and doesn't care to explore it -- and the want is back like it never left.

"Please... let me suck your cock."

He's never known of anything that can't be fixed by doing that, and the task will fill both need and want.

Harry says nothing for a moment, giving Elijah a long, appraising look. Elijah doesn't squirm under his gaze -- something Harry is used to, had even expected -- just looks back, all open and raw. Interesting. "I've already said you can stay," he says finally.

He pulls Elijah in a little closer, and Elijah squirms until his cock is situated alongside Harry's -- both sticky now with Elijah's come -- which makes Harry smile. The little bastard certainly isn't shy.

Not that Harry objects. Coyness can be tiresome, and the nervy sexuality of this kid is somehow only enhanced by how young he looks, how soft and innocent. "As for the rest," Harry murmurs, "we'll see, won't we?"


	6. Battles: Cate, Lando, Yuma, 1877

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=catemadam.jpg)

  
They aren't buying.

They're drinking, they're playing cards, but they aren't buying the girls.

They also aren't letting anyone else buy. They made it clear within a week of this… thing, whatever it is, that she will not be able to operate unless she goes to Sinclair.

She's not going to Sinclair.

But she's not going to have a business much longer, not with Sinclair sending his hands here nightly.

She hears the door open as Sarah goes to take a gent upstairs. Doesn't matter who's coming in, they won't get a chance to buy anyway, if the two men cutting off Sarah and her gent are any indication.

"Hey now, don' think it's yer turn, now is it?" one slurs.

Liv rolls her eyes from across the room. Liv has some money saved up, she's offered it if Cate can't make next month's rent, but what then? Even if Sutherland will give them a month on credit -- and he likely would if she were here to ask, but if he were here, he would have put a stop to it himself, the sheriff wouldn't ignore Donald Sutherland and his money -- they still have to eat. Liv's also told her that some of the girl's are talking about leaving and Cate can't blame them.

Cate's about ready to leave herself.

The slurrer is in the gent's face now, even though he's backed away (sorry, Sarah) and Cate makes a bet with herself on how many chairs she'll have to replace after tonight's fight.

Damned Sinclair.

It doesn't take a genius to assess the situation. Lando likes to think he's of above average intelligence (though there are some that would argue that -- possibly the man behind him, for example), and it seems pretty clear that Cate's is about to undergo some unexpected renovations due to violence.

There are two slightly rumpled and dirty ranch hands standing so as to block the stairway to the working rooms, and Sarah's gent is already backing away, clearly loathe to become involved with the two doing the blocking.

 _Too late_ , Lando thinks, which is quite clear by the stances of both the ranch hands. They are only looking for an excuse to start a fight, not an actual reason.

Sarah looks both afraid and angry. Cate is standing a few yards away, looking both furious and helpless. _Where's your little gun, Cate?_ Lando thinks. _Where are your knives? Why are you letting this go on?_

He suspects there will be a good reason, once he gets around to asking her. For now, however, he decides that it might be a nice form of relaxation for himself and Lawrence to engage in a friendly barroom free-for-all.

"Sarah," he says, smiling, friendly, and oh-so-relaxed. Lawrence shifts behind him, well aware of the meaning of that tone. Cate gapes at him like he's some kind of apparition. From the corner of his eye, he can see Liv grinning fiercely. He winks at her. Sarah looks at him, blinking a little. Sarah is still a bit wary of him. Ah well. "Take your gentleman friend upstairs, Sarah," he encourages gently. She looks at Lando for a long moment, and then a ghost of a smile curves her lips upward. She hooks her arm through the arm of the young man (who looks like he wants to object, but doesn't quite have the gumption), and moves toward the steps again, her stance determined.

"Excuse me," she says, defiant, voice only a tiny bit unsteady.

 _Good girl._

"Ain't his turn," one of the rowdies says, but he's looking at Lando, not at Sarah.

"Come now, my good sir," Lando says, stepping another couple of feet into the room. "I believe you and I both know the ladies of this establishment are quite capable of keeping account of who's turn it is, precisely." He takes a moment to unbutton his coat and tucks it behind the sheaths on his belt. "Step aside."

The man narrows his eyes, sneering at Lando a little. Lando can almost read his mind. Lando is too thin and too pretty to be any real threat. He lets himself smile a little, just enough to watch the man's face harden as he decides to 'teach Lando a lesson'.

"By the way," Lando says, just as the man opens his lips to issue some sort of ultimatum, threat, or insult. "Have you had the pleasure of meeting my good friend, Lawrence?"

He grins as all eyes in the room turn to Lawrence, who towers above Lando's fairly respectable five feet eleven inches by a full head. Lawrence steps forward, doing his best impression of an enormous, threatening mute (which he does quite well, Lando has to admit).

"Now, where were we? Oh, yes." Lando smiles again, but mostly without humor this time. "Step aside."

Of course, they don't.

Or they do, but only to slowly close in on Lando and Lawrence. Chairs scrape as their friends join them and form a loose circle around Lando and Lawrence. The biggest one, with a pockmarked face and missing teeth, says, "I don't think you understand how this works, boy. You're outnumbered."

Lando arches an eyebrow, smirking. "I don't think that will be a problem, given who we're dealing with."

It's the slurrer who moves first (typical, he's the meanest one of the lot of them, with the worst temper), but Lando isn't there for the punch to land. He's ducking smoothly under it, delivering a punch of his own to the slurrer's gut. Two others grab Lawrence's arms, he shrugs, almost, pulls his arms in and sends their heads together. They fall to the floor, knocked stupid.

And then all hell breaks loose.

The ranch hands surround Lawrence and it looks like he's almost a head floating on top of their bodies. Occasionally one gets knocked away. He's grinning fiercely, bright white in a brown face.

"Always wonder where they all come from, like there is a plantation in Louisiana with the motto 'we grow them big and stupid' or something..."

She looks to her right and sees Lando sweeping Ginny out of the way, arm around her waist, while from the corner of her eye, she sees one of the ranch hands jumping onto Lawrence's back. Lando grabs a shot glass from the bar and sends it flying with a quick flick of his wrist. It catches the man on Lawrence's back square between the eyes. He falls (long way down, this Lawrence is huge) and looks dumbly up at Lawrence.

Glancing back at Lando, he appears not to have taken his eyes off of Ginny's impressive cleavage at any time. "Don't recall having had the pleasure of meeting you, cherie," he says in Julien’s French-accented English, before dipping his head and kissing (possibly nipping, she can't tell) Ginny's neck. There's a high-pitched giggle and Julien has another conquest.

Loud grunt and Lawrence has someone over his head and the piano is right in front of him. Cate's praying that he isn't planning on throwing him when Lando calls "Mind the piano, you great lummox!" He goes flying towards the door ("She said, six foot if it was an inch, and I said 'only if you're measuring with a rubber yardstick!'").

Three of them decide that Lawrence is more than they can handle (good decision) and go to the bar (bad decision) where Lando has one foot up on the lowest rung of a barstool. He seems to be explaining the 'art of throwing a proper punch' to Ginny and Liv. One swings and Lando ducks away (his fist crashes into the bar behind Lando and he howls and backs away, holding his broken hand). Lando appears to be encouraging Liv to try to throw a punch (just what she needs, thank you, Lando, please teach Liv how to fight, really, can't thank you enough), turns toward one of the others and demonstrates. He pulls away, shaking his hand in an exaggerated manner as Liv and Ginny laugh.

He gives Liv a little push towards the third, who looks decidedly less confident now. She screws her eyes closed and swings. Not hard enough, but Lando's fist is just behind hers, punching him before Liv's opened her eyes again. He holds a finger to his lips and winks at Ginny while Liv's staring at the man at her feet. "Well done, mon petit chou." Liv grins and he swats her rear, making her jump.

Lawrence has another one in his grasp and looks to be ready to send him over the bar (no!), but Lando says, "Do you have any idea how much mirrors cost out here?" Lawrence glares at him and sends that one to join his friend by the door. Another closes in on him and Lawrence backhands him hard. He waits for the next to rush him, takes it without moving ("I was bitten by one, once, I've got a scar on my right buttock... You naughty thing, let go of my trousers," Lando is laughing, his words still perfectly accented despite his humor and the chaos around him), and begins pummeling him.

Lando sidles over to Sarah, kisses her on the cheek. "Your dress, it is the exact color of your eyes, cherie, how remarkable!" He steps out of the way of another flying ranch hand (dear lord in heaven, she's tired even thinking of lifting even one of them, how does Lawrence do it?), "Pardonez moi, cherie," and grabs his collar, tossing him to the pile at the door.

"Mon ami, I know you're having fun, but surely you intend to finish sometime this evening?"

And then he's bowing and pressing a kiss to the back of her hand, winks and murmurs, "Lovely to see you again, mon trésor," even as his foot slides behind him and trips another one. She can't help herself. She laughs.

Someone falls at her feet. It isn't Lando or Lawrence, though she can't really tell who he is, but most of the girls and gents have backed out of the brawl. So when he tries to get up again (Lando's cajoling, somewhere, "No, it's real silk, here, feel."), she feels fairly comfortable hiking up her skirt and kicking him in the ass, sending him head first into the stair post, where he knocks himself out.

Lawrence seems to be choking someone to death (at least his face is going purple) near the piano and Lando strolls over, taps him on the shoulder. He says, "I'll just take over from here," and when Lawrence lets him go, heaves him over with the others (the pile is dwindling, they're crawling off one by one).

One of the hands has hung back and, as Lando turns away from the door, he springs at Lando (Lando grunts, wind knocked out of him) and they both go the floor in a tangle. There's a blur of arms and legs and clothes rolling around on the floor and, when they break up, Lando bounces to his feet, grinning. The man seems to be somehow tangled up in his own trousers and suspenders. "It's a trick I learned in Texas, jackass roping."

Liv is hysterical with laughter.

Cate is hysterical with laughter. And relief.

There's one left, one that hasn't been knocked out or slunk away. Lawrence is cracking his knuckles and moving toward him, but Lando calls out, "No, he's mine," all laughter gone from his voice.

The remaining troublemaker appears to be speculating on his chances of getting successfully to the door. Lando knows his chances are slim anyhow, but he cuts his eyes to Lawrence anyway, then back to the door. Lando likes the odds firmly in his favor whenever possible. Lawrence ambles obligingly over to cover the exit.

Lando leans back against the bar, propping his elbows behind him on the top. "This is the part where I'm supposed to ask you why. And you, why, you will refuse to answer, demonstrating yourself to be a loyal lackey, albeit an unutterably stupid one." He smiles a little and cocks one leg forward. "Then I am supposed to have Lawrence break a couple of your fingers, whilst I demand information."

He grins cheerfully. "We're going to just skip that part, because frankly, I don't give a damn why. I also don't give a damn who, so we'll skip the next bit, too, the bit where I possibly break your nose and deliver several stinging gut punches." He lifts a half-full glass of whiskey from the bar and takes a drink. It burns satisfyingly as it goes down. "In fact, let's skip the entire next quarter of an hour or so, and go directly to the end bit."

"I forbid any form of retaliation for what happened here tonight. I forbid any form of retribution against Cate or her girls. I forbid any of you to show your exceedingly ugly faces here again, and I highly recommend you just avoid the city entirely until your bumps and bruises mend up." Lando smiles again, wide and friendly, and watches the sneer growing on the remaining ranch hand's face. He isn't particularly worried about it. If necessary, he can deliver the kind of demonstration that makes men like this discover Jesus. "I'm afraid you have abused your privileges here, and I am revoking them. Indefinitely. In return for not breaking or bloodying anything of yours, I'm asking you to leave quietly, and pass this message on to your little playmates. Oui?"

"You can't..." the man begins, but he stops abruptly -- letting out a rather amusing squeak of alarm -- because one of Lando's knives has suddenly sprouted from the wooden floor between the soles of his worn boots. The man stares at the knife quivering between his feet for a good, solid five seconds, then wrenches his gaze back to Lando.

"Damn," Lando drawls, smirking lazily, leaned back comfortably against the bar again. "I missed." Lando gives him a slow wink, still smirking, and says: "Don't come back here, mon ami. Tell your friends the same."

Maybe he feels like he needs to save face, or maybe he really _is_ stupid.

No weapons had been involved in the fight whatsoever, though most of the troublemakers, including this one, had worn guns. Lando suspects they'd been told not to use their guns by whoever had sent them in the first place. Time to wonder about it later.

The man's hand is twitching and Lando can see the intent on his face, can almost taste it in the suddenly heavy air.

"Don't do it," Lando murmurs, very soft, and the man's twitching fingers still. " I promise you, you will never clear leather, mon ami." And it is absolutely true. Lando smiles.

The man melts like tallow in June, seems to just shrink into himself, shoulders rounding, slumping, breath gusting out in a sigh. Lando stares expectantly at him, until he finally nods.

Lando watches him (Lawrence is doing the same) intently as he slinks out, and doesn't look away until the door closes behind him.

Lando collects and sheathes his knife before coming to her. "Cate," he scolds, sounding playful, "The riffraff you allow in your fine establishment is really quite appalling!"

The smile doesn't reach his eyes.

"Julien," and it's difficult to keep her voice light, "how lovely of you to stop by." He leans over, placing a light kiss on her cheek.

For the next hour or so, Cate dances around the room, smiling, laughing, playing the good hostess. She is outwardly relaxed and pleasant, working to make up for lost profit (and how long had that been happening, hmmm? It hadn't looked like a new thing to Lando), while simultaneously avoiding Lando like the plague. He can see subtle signs of the tension in her.

He recognizes it. He understands it.

It makes him want to sigh.

Lando likes a lot of things about Cate: her independence, her strength, her indomitable will, her absolute determination to work hard, to succeed, her boundless spirit, and the kindness and loyalty and loving nature that she tries so hard to conceal.

He loves the fact that she is protective of those she cares about. He is honored and humbled to be counted among that number.

But sometimes she's so blasted stubborn he just wants to choke her.

She bides her time, waiting until he becomes wrapped up in a game, and quietly makes her way to the stairs. Before she's halfway to the landing, however, she hears him fold and excuse himself.

"What, Julien, afraid you'll lose?" one of the players says, laughing.

"Certainly not. However, I see the lady of the house is leaving us and I do _so_ wish to bid her a proper goodnight." She cannot see it, not when she's glaring at the wall in front of her, but she's quite sure he winked at them.

She can still hear them laughing and cat calling when Lando's hand settles into the small of her back.

"Surely you weren't planning on going to bed without me?" He sounds teasing, relaxed, but there's an edge to his voice. He knows exactly what she'd planned.

"Of course not. I thought you remembered your way upstairs, unless you're losing your wits in your advanced years. Are you losing your wits?" Baiting him is hardly the best course of action, but this will be ugly no matter what she says at this point, and she's tired and jumpy from having waited for this.

"I assure you, my dear, my wits are quite as sharp as they ever were," he says, holding the door to the third floor stairs open for her.

His smell, expensive cologne and smoke and whiskey and Lando, fills her nose as she passes, and she could almost be happy to smell it, had been thrilled to smell it earlier, before he'd watched her with knowing eyes for hours. Now it just tightens the ball of dread in her stomach further. "How lovely for you."

He waits until the door closes before he lets Julien fall away from his face and voice. He doesn't speak until they are in Cate's sitting room, and the sight of her ramrod straight spine and tense shoulders pulls a sigh from him.

"Cate, for God's sake, I'm not going to bite you." He wants his voice to be slightly teasing, but instead he thinks he only sounds tired and frustrated. "You're completely intent on making this difficult aren't you?" Oddly, he feels a wave of fondness for her well up, in spite of her frustrating stubborn streak.

She is not a child. She has not been a child for years and he does not need to speak to her as though she were one. "I do not intend to make this anything. I intend to go to sleep. Unless you have a problem with that?"

The muscles in his jaw flex and he grits out, "Cate-"

"No. I'm going to bed. You don't have to, but if you want to talk to someone, I suggest you find someone else. I'm certain the girls would be more than happy to discuss, what was it, ah yes, 'the art of throwing a punch.'"

He sighs again. Yep. Difficult. He pulls her into his arms (she is stiff and uncooperative, but he's not taking no for an answer) and sinks down onto the edge of the bed, dragging her with him. She opens her mouth to object when he pulls her onto his lap, but he kisses her, quick, chaste, but it surprises her enough to shut her up.

He winds fingers around the side of her neck and pulls her close, tucks her head under his chin and just cradles her. She's warm and she smiles nice and familiar, and it's nice just to have her close, feel her close. "Oh, sunshine," he says, and kisses the top of her head. "I'm sorry I wasn't here when it started."

For a moment, she goes loose and relaxed and curves into him, and he feels her shiver a little. It's lasts all of two seconds, before she stiffens again (girl has iron in her spine, he swears it) and straightens up, drawing away to look at him. Her eyes are narrowed on his face. "I don't want to fight, love. But I want to know. I risked my life, I risked my friend's life, and I want to know why."

His voice is harder than he wants, but maybe not as hard as it should be. He has never been as hard with her as he can be, that's certain.

But it's as hard as he's going to be, and that will have to be enough.

She owes him an answer. She knows this, but she doesn't have to like it.

The rate things have been going, she owes him her business. With Sinclair's boys coming around every night for the last few weeks, she'd been going through her savings to keep the house in furniture and alcohol (they had a habit of skipping on their tabs, but who would tell them they wouldn't be served?).

But she cannot _prove_ Sinclair had a hand in it. Yes, they work for him. Yes, they kept her from running her business. But she doesn't know for certain that it was done on Sinclair's orders (still she knows what she thinks happened, yes).

He'd come around again, all sweet words and money thrown about, propositioned her again, two days before his boys had started their siege. He'd been propositioning her since she'd taken the property and opened her house here. She normally danced around refusing outright, but she was tired that night, three girls sick, two more fighting, liquor delivery running late, and she'd snapped that she would never go to bed with him.

Harry Sinclair is a man who must have the best of everything. He wears the finest clothes, he rides the best horses, drinks only expensive, imported brandy. Cate knows she is no longer the best. She's still beautiful, yes, but she's no longer the most beautiful whore in San Francisco. She will be thirty next spring; she's past her prime. It's an honest assessment, after all, she's in the business of selling feminine beauty and she knows what looks back at her in the glass every morning. There's a line, faint but there, between her brows, and she has the beginnings of crows' feet. Liv is more beautiful than she is now and Faith is a close second, if he prefers blondes.

But apparently least attainable is even more desirable than the best in Sinclair's eyes. She'd made herself unattainable. That had been a mistake.

She wonders if she had just done it when he'd first asked if things would have gone this far. But she'd been a new madam then and young, far younger than most in her position and she'd needed to keep it clear that she was not a whore here. It was necessary for the girls, it was necessary for the customers, and it was necessary for herself. Madams do not turn tricks.

So she'd flirted and stayed just out of his reach. Later, when he'd kept calling on her, when she understood Yuma better, understood his position and power in this town, she'd just danced faster. She can't afford having Sinclair as an enemy, but she's managed it all the same.

She curses her stupidity even as she tries to figure out just how much she can tell Lando (still and patient, running a soothing hand over her back), so that he'll be satisfied, without telling him so much that he feels the need to interfere.

Then again, there's always the truth. Lando is not a stupid man, he will catch her if she lies outright, but he'll understand the truth, and he'll understand that he cannot act on it.

"I seem to have upset Harry Sinclair. Injured his pride when I turned him down." Lando's brows shoot up at this and she manages a wry grin. "I know, hardly the smartest thing I’ve done. Almost as clever as the time I brought a bloody lump of a man up to my room."

He laughs then, but sobers quickly. "Christ, what'd you do a thing like that for, love?"

"He's been asking," demanding, really, but she's not going to give him any more of a reason to get angry than she must, "since I first came here. Jesus, Lando, I've been nice about it for four years now, and he wouldn't stop asking. It was a bad day, there were problems with the girls, we were short on liquor, and I was just tired of it. I said the wrong thing."

"And then his boys started coming around." He's the tense one now, muscles pulled tight under her, almost shaking, and she realizes she's rubbing his neck and clinging to one hand, now trying to calm him. It's not working, but she's trying.

"Yes. And you saw how that was." And it's all up to him now, really. If he gets it in his head that he has to do something, there's not a damn thing she can do to stop him, but he's probably the smartest man she's ever known, if he just _thinks_ first.

She watches him turn it over in his mind and chews her lip.

He sees the problem. Oh yes. Sees it clearly.

He frowns deeply, trying to look at it from every possible angle. Trying to think it out of existence (Bills would have said), really.

There are things he knows already that might help the situation towards some kind of ... well, standoff, really. Not conclusion. Just ... a stalemate. One of them is that Lawrence will be staying on in Yuma when he leaves. Staying here. He hasn't asked Cate about it, and he isn't going to. He had brought Lawrence here for no reason other than to leave him, and Lawrence is well aware of that. That alone will keep anything like tonight's events from happening in the future.

But it won't solve Sinclair, it won't keep him off of Cate's back (literally, and the thought makes him grind his teeth and scowl until he becomes aware that Cate is rubbing his neck with one gentle hand, trying to keep him from tensing), or keep him from trying something else. And Lando knows Sinclair's type. He _will_ try something else. Men like Sinclair don't take no for an answer. Men like Sinclair feel entitled to whatever they want, and will go to great lengths to obtain it.

But Lando cannot afford to take care of this in any lasting or permanent way. On several levels, he can't afford to do that.

Threats won't work on Sinclair, not even threats that draw blood. To put a stop to Sinclair's interest in Cate, Lando would have to put a stop to Sinclair. Period.

And he can't do that.

He can't afford to be hunted in Yuma. This is his haven, his refuge. He can't afford to make this another place he dares not show his face, any of his faces.

He will kill to protect Cate, yes. He's done it, and he doesn't regret it. But he still dreams it. He will do it, if it comes to that, and will feel very little in the way of regret, because Cate's life is more valuable than Sinclair's. He knows it is, he feels it in his gut, in his bones, in the deepest, ugliest places in his mind, but that wouldn't make killing him right. It wouldn't make it easier or cleaner. He would still dream it, like Brody, like Urban.

He has never wanted to be a killer. Never.

He has done it, and he will do it again, if he must, but ( _God, please_ ) only if he must. Only if it goes that far, only if Sinclair becomes dangerous to Cate and her girls in other ways, ways that Lando cannot fix with a bodyguard and the thousand dollars that is currently in his wallet, but will soon be in Cate's hands.

If there is another way, he has to find it. They have to find it.

"Love," he says, and looks at her for a long moment, her anxious eyes and the calm expression she is trying so hard to maintain (for him, to keep _him_ calm), her lips, which curve up into a small smile at the endearment (and his lips curl up, too, and God, he wants to kiss her, wants it badly, and he has these moments, moments in which the fact that she is beautiful and the fact that she is wonderful combine to sort of waylay him, flay him open and leave him raw and gasping surprise and desire, but he has never had one so strong as this, looking at the smile on her face and the trust in her eyes), and he has to shake his head a little to clear it, and look away from her lips. "Have you ever thought about hosting card games here? High stakes games? The kind that pull in gentlemen of means?"

There was heat in his eyes a moment before he'd looked away. That look is her stock in trade, that look is what's kept food in her mouth, and she evaluates its worth.

Not financial worth this time, or not directly, at any rate. She could have him, if she wanted him. It wouldn't be hard, he wants her; she'd just have to make it clear she wouldn't turn him down. If she was particularly careful about it, she could likely make him think it had been all his idea.

There would be a certain degree of security in being Lando's lover. He takes care of her, helps out as it is, but it'd be another tie to here, another, stronger hold on him than friendship and old gratitude. It would be another way to ensure he'd come back and a better way of keeping Sinclair away from her than his threats to Sinclair's workers. Sinclair wouldn't mess with Julien or Julien's knives. Not his style to pick fights with those he can't get power over easily.

But it'd be like smoking while sitting on a keg of dynamite. A store of whore's tricks wouldn't cover her deceit for long, just distract him a bit. Lando wouldn't take well to being manipulated; he'd hate her for it. It'd insure that he'd never come back, no matter how good she is at what she does. And then she'd be even worse off than she is now.

And she'd hate herself for it. Lando's been nothing but good to her, has saved her twice now, has helped the girls out. Lando's a good man, no matter what he may believe about himself, and it would be wrong to use him that way, for all it'd be practical.

So she focuses on what he'd said aloud instead of what his eyes had said without his permission, doesn't push into him, doesn't make herself soft and yielding. She keeps her voice relaxed, but cool and businesslike as she says, "We have games here, Lando. You were just in one not half an hour ago. And it's money play. I'm not sure exactly what it is you think I should be doing differently."

He laughs, and deliberately shifts her off of his lap. He stands and takes a couple of steps away, absent-mindedly rubbing at the prickle of her eyes on the back of his neck. "No, Cate, sweet, what you have here is trash poker."

He turns back toward her, and she is sitting (with that iron in her spine again) and looking at him, attentive, her brows drawn slightly together in a frown. Probably about the word trash used in conjunction with her establishment, which makes him grin.

"You run small stakes games, sunshine. For change." He slides his fingers into his coat and snags his wallet. He keeps a hundred dollars for himself (he can build from that easily enough, even in a place this size) and fans out the rest, flapping it at her. "High stakes games, Cate. The kind that you buy your way into for a thousand dollars, more than that, sometimes. The kind that, if you win, let you advance to the next round of play. Tournament games. Real money, and visitors to your house -- to the city -- with real money."

She frowns at the money in his hand, frowns into his face, frowns at the money again.

He sits next to her and catches her hand, pressing the bills into it. She tries to draw her hand back, open, palm-flat so as not to grasp the money, and he holds her wrist. She looks at him, narrow-eyed (though not insulted, she knows better than that) and he carefully folds her fingers around the thick stack of bills.

"Tournament poker, sunshine, will put your name on the circuit. If you make this a place where high-rollers come to get their kicks, you will become well known. This place will become well known. If you make it _the most hospitable, pleasant, and amusing_ place in this area, in the territory, then it will put you into the friendly eye of several men with wide-reaching influence, and very little patience with those that interfere with their amusements." He meets her eyes and keeps her hand folded around the money.

She stares at him, thoughtful, and he can see her planning how it could be done, thinking of what she'd need to get the place in shape for a thing like that, turn comfortable and neat into opulent and impressive.

"I can arrange it, Cate. I can set it up the first time, but you'd have to keep them coming back." He thinks she will go for it. Her eyes are bright with possibility. He isn't having to fight her so hard to keep her hand around the money.

"And even Sinclair wouldn't be stubborn and foolish enough to mess with men like McKellan, Cate. And I think I can get him here."

He doesn't mention Bills. High stakes games in Yuma will almost certainly draw _him_ here, too, but Lando is willing to chance it. He is willing to work to avoid the complications that meeting Bills here would inevitably create. He's willing to miss some games, or attend them elsewhere, to give Cate this. And Hell, maybe Bills is nowhere close by. Maybe he's out east somewhere, or playing the riverboats. Maybe it won't happen.

He makes his voice as silky and convincing as he knows how. "Take the money, Cate. I don't need it. Won't do anything but piss it away, anyhow. I can make more. Take it, and make this place a gambler's fantasy. I'll do the rest."

Jesus. It's a chance. It's more than a chance, it's all she could have hoped for and then some. It's safety from Sinclair, it's a better house, it's better things, it's a way off the knife's edge, it's security, it's a way out, someday.

It's a dream. It's her dream and Lando has dropped it into her lap.

She looks up from the money to see him grinning at her and she thinks that she must look flummoxed, but damn, he just... And she leans forward, only intending to give him a quick kiss, a peck, thank you, but then her mouth opens without her permission. His tongue slides into her mouth, teasing, coaxing, as his arm slides around her waist, pulling her closer. He drags his teeth carefully over her lip.

She feels his teeth and her eyes fly open.

Her eyes are open and she's pushing away from him, breathing hard. He's breathing hard as well. At some point her hand had opened, money fallen over his lap and the bed and the floor, so much money and he'd given it to her. He was going to help her (again) and she'd almost used him (again), all after she'd promised herself she wouldn't.

He's almost gathered up all of the money, just getting the last of it off the floor when he says, "I don't believe I've ever had a thousand dollar kiss before."

She laughs and it sounds too high to her, maybe almost hysterical, and she puts her hand over her mouth (when did her face get so hot?) before she manages to calm herself a bit and says, "Don't believe I've ever given one, so I guess we're even."

"Reckon so." And he's pushing the money back into her hand. She tries to pull it back and he wraps both of his hands over hers. "Take it, Cate. Take it and make everything better here. Least I can do."

"It's too much money and you've done so much already. I can't-"

"You _will_. I'm not arguing with you over this. Please. I want you to have it. Take it." His eyes are still dark, there's a flush on his cheeks (and who'd have thought Lando could blush? Not Cate.), but he's so earnest, deadly earnest, and she can't say no to him this time.

"Fine. But I _will_ pay you back, every cent of it." She tries to make it clear that she means it, make her voice hard, her face hard, and thinks of how her mother used to call her mulish when she didn't get her way.

Oh, he's getting frustrated with her, he's almost as stubborn as she is. "Can't you ever just take a gift and say thank you? It's a commonly accepted practice in many places, you might have heard of it."

She leans over, kisses him on the cheek (not going down that path again, she has a strict 'one mistake a day' policy), and smiles at him, so he'll know she means it. "Thank you, Lando. Thank you for everything."

He really has to stand up. He really has to, has to move out of her space and her smell, so he does, and then walks around the room aimlessly, pretending to be thinking, and grateful that he is still wearing his jacket, which conceals her effects on his body, if he keeps himself turned correctly. Which he does, whilst he pretends to be thinking some more.

Well, no, not pretending, Lando really _is_ thinking, but he's not thinking about anything useful or productive. He's thinking about the fact that he can still taste her on his lips and smell her on his own skin. It shouldn't be unusual, he sleeps in her bed, he wakes smelling her on his skin quite often, but this is different. This is different.

The fact that he knows that she had been drinking peach brandy at some point in the night makes it different. The fact that he can taste peach brandy lingering faintly on his tongue makes it different.

There will be no sleep for him, he is fairly sure. Not in the same bed, with her, at any rate. Wanting her is not new, not even wanting her powerfully, not even wanting her enough that his body betrays him. That has happened before on several occasions. But she's never actually kissed him before, and he's never felt her heart pounding against his chest and heard her breathing go short and sharp. Cate has never heated up before.

 _Gratitude_ , he thinks. _Nothing but gratitude, doesn't mean anything. Nothing but gratitude, and money._

And ouch, that stings a little. But. He thinks he understands why she stopped. He thinks he understands one of the reasons (Lando himself understands many of them, always has), anyhow. He thinks he should feel pleased or relieved or... something. Something other than disappointed and achingly hard, anyhow. She doesn't want to use him. And that should make him happy.

It should, and what's funny, what's really pretty goddamned funny, is that he understands why it doesn't. He understands that he isn't thinking with his head or even with his heart, he's thinking with his cock. It doesn't change the fact that he half wishes she'd let herself use him, just a little, because he will never be capable of taking something she doesn't want, genuinely want. He will never be capable of even letting himself ask for it. So it will never happen, not unless she initiates it, lets it. And she won't do that.

Dammit.

In the morning, he'll be relieved, grateful for her ability to see clearly when he cannot, but just now... well, he's pretty sure most of his ability to see clearly has migrated south.

It's almost a shame, really. If they were lovers, Sinclair would never...

He stops, turns. Looks at her for a long moment. She is watching him, and when she sees his expression, her eyes go a little wide with curiosity (desire, too, he thinks, but makes himself pretend not to see that, pretends not to understand that at least some of her desire is real, just like she pretends not to know how dangerous it is to let him come here). "Cate," he says slowly, and she cocks her head. "Your girls think we're lovers. I think... I think even Elijah, and a few others that come here often but don't actually live here, think we're lovers."

She just looks at him, but she's tensed a little, like she's preparing to defend herself against any suggestions from him that they should actually _become_ lovers. It's enough to make him chuckle, because -- in a rather bastardly kind of way -- it's nice to know it's something she has to stop herself from wanting, stop herself from doing. She relaxes when he laughs, and that's good, too.

"How hard would it be to spread that rumor a little further? How hard would it be to make it common knowledge around town, everywhere around town? Would you object to it? Help me reinforce it, with some well-placed words, some public outings?"

He loves her mind. So sharp, smartest woman he's ever met (smarter than most men he knows), and she understands him at once.

"He would never..." she says, and glances at the knives at his waist. He doesn't turn away (he should, but he's almost having fun now, it's nice not being the only one) and she is distracted for a moment, eyes leveled on his groin, lips slightly open. Then her eyes stutter to his face, wide and embarrassed for a split second, before narrowing. "Why you devious..." she breathes, and Lando laughs again. She glares at him, clearly wanting to hold onto outrage, but she can't, she never can, with him, and finally she grins, girlish and wide, and this is better.

It would be good to hold her, kiss her, feel her warm and soft and sweet and open to him, God, yes it would be. But this is more important, this is better for them.

"Now that you've checked to make sure things are to your satisfaction," he remarks dryly, and smirks at her little indignant gasp, "tell me what you think of the idea? Will it work? Do you think I'll need to further demonstrate on the matter of my capabilities, or will what his men tell him be enough?"

"I think... Yes, tonight should be enough to convince him that you shouldn't be crossed. But as far as the rumor goes…" She smoothes out her skirt, thinking hard. This was tricky. They'd have to be careful...

"What? You don't think people would believe it? Why-" Lando sounds like he's almost offended. She wants to roll her eyes (stupid man, always looking for insult when none is there), but she manages to resist the urge. Lando would only tease her for it anyway. It amuses him to catch her acting anything less than the perfect lady.

"Let me think for a moment, will you?" He quiets, leaning against the washstand, watching her, and it's a distraction. Enough of one that she gets up, begins to pace, while she tries to think of how best to play out their little farce. "We'll have to be careful how we do this. If we just start showing up all over town with me hanging on you, no one will ever believe it. Sinclair will know we're doing it for his benefit."

Lando snorts and grimaces. "Give me a little credit for having sense. Do you have anything in particular in mind?"

"No, and that's the..." The light catches on something on her dressing table and she turns. Her silver hand mirror. She remembers when Lando brought it, remembers what he'd looked like when he'd presented it to her, proud and almost boyishly bashful. She remembers the flush of pleasure that had caught her when she opened it, not because she wasn't used to his gifts -- she's received more gifts, and from more fools (though she's never counted Lando in their number) than she cares to remember -- but because it was clear that he had been so pleased with having found it for her. He always brings gifts, and not just for her (though she and Liv always receive the most carefully thought out gifts), and it's always something she had been wishing she could afford to buy for herself. "Wait, have you done your shopping yet?"

"My shopping? I do recall someone having told me that I was not, for any reason, to come back with gifts." He arches a brow at her, clearly amused.

"And I told you the same thing every other time. Have you or have you not done your shopping?" A touch impatient, but he can be horrifyingly frustrating when he's feeling playful, stupid, stupid man.

"I did, but I can always do more. Have anything you particularly want, dear?" The thought of hitting him with her solid silver mirror is more tempting by the minute.

"Actually, no. Not from you anyway," she says archly, and he grins, wrinkling his nose, which he doesn't often do, but she thinks makes him look about fourteen years old, probably why he doesn't do it. "But I think Liv can help us. She has enough sense not to overplay her hand. And the milliner is a worse gossip than any of my girls."

Lando nods, thoughtfully, rearranging some things in his mind. Liv, yes, a good idea, that. Liv has a very firm grasp on the reality of Cate's situation. And there is no doubt that she would do it. Lando is fairly sure Liv loves Cate, in that female, sisterly sort of fashion. He wonders if Cate knows that. He glances at her -- chewing at her bottom lip and running her fingers over the back of the mirror on her dressing table, brows drawn together in a faintly worried frown -- and decides it is probably not the best time to ask.

"I'll talk to her in the morning," he says, and Cate turns slightly, and smiles. "This is going to work," he says, just because he knows it will make her smile widen, will reassure her. He has never lied to her, and she knows that. "I'll get in touch with McKellen, we'll have Liv pass on discreet misinformation, and you..." He catches her around her waist (she lets out a shrill, breathy sound of surprise that makes him grin) and tosses her bodily onto the bed. "You will redecorate this place."

"Beastly man," Cate huffs, struggling against the weight of her dress and the softness of the mattress to regain her feet. "You're a bully, that's what you are."

But she is smiling.

"The benefit of being bigger than you, sunshine." He grins and she shoves his shoulder playfully.

"Wash up," she commands, and sniffs disapprovingly, as though smelling something foul. "You stink like a saloon, m’sieur. And there's blood on your knuckles."

"It's your bloody saloon," he grumbles, and catches the soap she throws at him, grinning.


	7. Introductions: Eliah, Lando, Yuma, 1877

Cate told Elijah to come by today and so he does, careful to slip in before anyone's really woken up yet. The place has always looked strange to him in early daylight, like the sun-baked skeleton of a room otherwise cozy with smoke and bodies.

Elijah turns a chair around and straddles it, facing the stairs, and waits for her, or Liv, or Dom, or anyone. The fresh deck of cards Harry gave him last week is crisp between his fingers when he snaps it from one palm to the other, the cards jumping in a slick arc in the air between his fingers.

The ten of diamonds spins out and lands with a muffled flutter to the scratched floorboards. Elijah swears under his breath and reaches for it with the tip of his boot.

Lando doesn't exactly know the boy sitting astride one of Cate's chairs, idly toying with a deck of cards so new the sun spits shards of light off their waxy coating. That is, he recognizes his face, but he doesn't actually know him. He can't recall where he has seen the boy before, and he takes a moment to think about it while the boy performs a few passable feats of dexterity with the deck.

When the ten of diamonds escapes him, the boy mutters a frankly surprising obscenity, and stretches out one denim-clad leg, boot-toe pointed, to retrieve it.

"Careful, mon ami," Lando says, and hears his own voice as if it belongs to a stranger, the alien dip and curl of Julien's smooth accent. "If you smudge the card by mistake, as an honest gambler, you'll have to discard the entirety of the deck."

The boy freezes, his mouth dropping slightly open, and turns to stare at Lando. He has the most enormous blue eyes Lando has ever seen, made even bigger by his wide-eyed surprise.

When it becomes clear that the boy isn't, in fact, going to say anything at all (is merely going to continue to stare at Lando as though he is some sort of apparition, apparently), he says: "Bon Jour. I know your face, but I cannot think of your name, monsieur. Forgive me, I beg you."

The man steps out of what little shadows the room and the early hour afford and Elijah is immediately taken with an intense sense of displacement. He knows it's the stranger who doesn't fit in, really, with his fancy accent and his lofty manners and the peaceable easiness of his movements -- all at odds with this place.

Elijah can detect implacable air of... familiarity; the man knew exactly where to stand to be out of sight, knew just where to step to avoid the creak of the floorboards. Elijah, born and raised here, is the one suddenly feeling out of place.

He offers the lanky man a squint of his eyes that is dubious at best, and sets his jaw firmly, something he can't help with Harry and finds himself affecting now, for no reason he can discern.

His fingers curl around the straight edges of the deck, ten of diamonds forgotten. "Elijah Wood. Who're you?"

"Of course," Lando says. He really should have seen it. "You're Deborah's son. You look like her in the face." He ignores the barely concealed challenge in the set of Elijah Wood's jaw. He doubts very much Elijah is even aware of it. It looks like a familiar expression to him, and Lando supposes that the son of a whore must have plenty of opportunity to use an expression like that. Poor lad. "Julien," he offers, and dips into Julien's customary half-bow, perfectly natural since he's spent the last several weeks as Julien. "Julien LaFleur. C'est un plaisir de vous rencontrer, jeune monsieur."

He has gifts (of course, though Cate has forbidden it, and more than once) for the girls, and he thinks it might be wise to get them distributed out from under Cate's regard, if he can manage it. She doesn't understand, considers it a waste of money, but Lando knows about being without friends, and he knows about treating the few that he has right. And the girls are good to him. He likes them (some of them more than others, but all of them in general), and he likes to see them smile.

He has something for Deborah in particular, as they share a taste for prose he hasn't encountered in any of the other girls. It's tucked in his saddlebags leaning against the wall just inside the doors. "Where is votre maman, Elijah?"

The mention of his mother nearly makes him flinch, unexpectedly. Cate and the girls -- and even Harry -- have taken care not to mention her around him, which often creates gaping, conspicuous silences in the middle of discussions, awkward loss of momentum in conversations. Elijah began to leave rooms, first quietly then eventually with a maximum of disruption, knowing he was leaving the girls flummoxed and Cate bordering on angry.

In any case, no one ever dares take Deborah Wood's death lightly; this man is either profoundly stupid or not in the know. Considering that Elijah only barely recognizes the tangle of clipped syllables falling from Julien's lips as Italian or French, he'd guess on the latter.

 _'Mother' probably sounds the same in all the languages of the world_ , Elijah thinks shrilly but keeps himself in check and gets up abruptly, the chair legs stuttering on the floor.

"She's dead."

He crouches to pick up the ten of diamonds, gaze never leaving the foreign man. Elijah tucks the stray card into the middle of the deck and puts the stack face down on the table before sitting down again, this time with his back to the backrest -- and Julien.

There is a moment of stark _shockrage_ that Lando has to grasp at wildly (his hands ball into fists at his sides) to keep it from exploding outward in a snarl. It's happened to him before, but it doesn't happen often, and it always surprises him when it does. _Sinclair_ , he thinks, and his thoughts are whitely furious. He can see Harry Sinclair's face in his mind, and for a moment it is battered and bloody, Urban's face when Lando had finished with him, and if Sinclair had something to do with Deborah's death, if Lando found out he'd been even remotely bloody involved...

He gets control over his bitter thoughts with the expediently simple image of Cate's blue-eyed calm. He never said anything to Deborah about Sinclair; it would have been foolish. She was... had been... almost a kept woman, almost respectable because of Sinclair's attentions, in her snug, neat house with its muslin curtains that she had sewn by hand, and into which Lando never set foot. He never said anything to her, because asking her to give it up because Lando didn't trust Sinclair wouldn't have been fair. And he understood exactly why he had never been invited into her home (although he thinks now that maybe he had only understood the most obvious reason, and not the most important reason, the reason that is sitting in front of him now with his back painfully straight, the one that looked almost panicked at the sound of his the word 'maman' on Lando's lips), and he never blamed her for it.

He spoke to Cate, though. He mentioned it to Cate, and Cate's response was stark and simple and logical, and correct, of course. _"Would you have her throw away what her heart wants just because she might never have it, Lando? She may not have everything, but she has things that she thinks are worth what she gives for them. Isn't that her choice?"_

And, again, he thinks he had only seen the most obvious meaning in Cate's words, not the one that really mattered, not the one that was likely there all the time. Even if Deborah had loved Sinclair -- something Lando has more than a little difficulty comprehending, as Deborah was a smart girl, and a sweet one, far and away better than Sinclair could ever hope to deserve -- that was probably only a very small part of why she had done things the way she had.

He feels stupid for not having realized it, but he has never had a child to protect. He doesn't blame Deborah for keeping Elijah away from Lando. He can't help wonder if she'd kept him away from Sinclair as well.

He hopes so.

He'll still kill Sinclair if he had anything to do with Deborah's death (he'd do it for any of them, for almost anyone, for that matter, and it's unsettling to realize that his loathing for Sinclair runs that deep), and he'll find out from Cate as soon as he can, but for now, he needs to say something.

"I'm very sorry, Elijah." He walks around the table, a wide arc so that he doesn't come at Elijah from behind. He doesn't want to surprise him, and it's only fair to give him time to compose his face, if he needs to. He pulls out a chair without waiting for an invitation (more Lando than Julien, that, but Elijah doesn't know the difference), and sits down. "I liked Deborah very much. I didn't know." And then, stupidly, "I brought her a book of poems. I was teaching her to speak French."

He doesn't know why he even says it, except that he will miss those things about her, and it seems important to let Elijah know that.

Elijah eyes Lando sidelong, sizing him up experimentally, still unsure what to make of him. He wants to yell at him to shut the fuck up about his mother, but what Julien is saying is something Elijah didn't know about her, something unlike anything they ever gave her, even Harry.

The fact that this man knows something about her Elijah didn't grates at what little he'll let himself think about these days, and he splits the cards in two against the table a little more violently than necessary, the sharp sound cracking through the air around them. Julien -- with his impeccable suit and the infuriatingly concerned tilt of his head -- doesn't flinch, but his eyes do narrow almost imperceptibly; Elijah looks away to fan the cards across the tabletop with unsteady hands.

"What the hell would she have wanted to learn French for? She wasn't going anywhere." He spits the words under his breath as mean as he can make them, tensing up at the habitual expectation of physical reprimand. But Harry is home, probably still snoring last night off, just like Elijah left him shortly before sunrise.

Lando watches Elijah turn inward and tense up, like he's going to implode, and he barely hears the tone in which the words are spoken. The tone doesn't matter. Elijah's body speaks far more honestly than his voice, hunched and brittle, shutting Lando out, shutting everyone out. Poor kid.

"She said French was a beautiful language," he tells Elijah. "That even ugly words were beautiful in French."

She had said that, but that wasn't all she had said about it. It was true that she hadn't been going anywhere, but she had dreamed about it. Or maybe just imagined it. He feels for Elijah, that he hadn't known that about his mother. "Your maman was a woman who looked for beauty wherever she could find it, Elijah. I will miss her."

"Who the fuck are you to miss her?" he hears himself yell before he can even remember to be quiet, to be silent and stoic and uncaring and mean towards anyone who pretends to care.

The chair skids backwards and he stares down at Julien with all the hatred he can muster. The effect is ruined by the proximity, by Elijah's inability to leave, to just go before he breaks something again, whether it's a wall or his fist or Julien or himself.

"You meant nothing to her," he cries, and yeah, the fucking tears are here again and Elijah's fists curl in on themselves on the table, scraped knuckles white. "She never talked about you and you didn't even know she was dead! _You meant nothing to her_."

He can't quite meet Julien's eyes by the time he speaks the last words, and he suddenly wishes for Cate to appear, to shoo him upstairs to Liv or to the kitchen to feed him or to the door to Harry's bed. To anyone who knows better than this Julien.

Elijah listens to the echo of his own words, brittle and harsh like frozen spiderwebs, and in the swelling silence Elijah gives in, looks back at Julien. He's met with a calm gaze that both angers and unsettles him.

Lando can't help but be a little angry that no one has let this kid vent his grief. Lando can see it, pent up inside him like a poison thing, a thing with claws, and surely Cate wouldn't let him go on like this?

But of course, Cate would, Cate who is still choking on guilt and grief of her own, who won't let anyone ease it. Cate might not even see how grief is strangling Elijah, because Cate has made it her business not to let things like that get too close to her. She doesn't always manage to keep things at arms length -- Lando, for instance -- but often she does, and he can't even blame her for it. Things are safer that way.

Elijah stares at him, his enormous eyes wounded and angry, and Lando stretches out one long leg and hooks his toe around the leg of the chair Elijah had abandoned, pulling it back, inviting Elijah wordlessly to sit down.

He doesn't, not immediately anyhow, and his jaw clenches again, angles itself into stubborn lines that Lando recognizes. He looks like Deborah like that, Deborah every time Lando had brought her something she thought too expensive or had slipped silver dollars, warmed from his hands, into her bodice, tucking them beneath the warm curve of her breasts. Lando had always been able to flirt and cajole that expression off her face, tease smiles out of her. He might be able to do that to her son as well; Elijah is still young enough that Lando might be able to chide him into better humor, but it's chancy. Elijah is a boy-man, and he might only bristle further if Lando coddles him, treats him like a child.

"You meant everything to her," Lando says, and doesn't doubt for an instant that it's true. "She kept you away from me, and rightly so, because men like me aren't good influences on boys, Elijah." He smiles, wicked-sharp, Julien's gambling smile, and watches Elijah recoil slightly. He's certain he doesn't imagine the glimmer of interest in Elijah's eyes. All boys his age are hopelessly fascinated by the mysterious stranger, after all.

Lando had been, and Billy Boyd had been nowhere near as showy as Julien is.

"Your maman was not a stupid woman, and I do not believe she would raise a stupid son. Think it through, Elijah. Do you think she meant for you to become a man like me? Do you think she would even want to take that chance?" He cocks a brow at Elijah, lets his smile soften into something friendly. Elijah relaxes slightly, and Lando tugs the chair forward until it bumps against the back of Elijah's knees.

"Sit down, mon ami," he says gently. "I have been away a long time. Tell me what happened to my friend Deborah."

Elijah's ass hits the seat of the chair dully and he pushes his hands into the lining of his coat pockets to keep them from doing anything else. Julien's gaze on him is unbearably compassionate and Elijah suddenly wants to tell the man everything the others won't hear.

"Consumption. Five months ago. She-- she'd been sick for a while."

 _And she'd weighed nothing against his chest when he'd ignored the doctor's warning and crept into her bed to hold her against him, begging her not to leave him, ever. Not like this._

Elijah blinks back the fresh wave of grief and sits up straighter, balling his hands into fists inside his coat.

"How like her never to tell me," Lando says, and stands abruptly. Elijah slumps back in his chair, his rigid posture failing, as though in reaction to Lando looming above him.

Lando goes behind the bar and pours a pair of glasses of whiskey and brings them back to the table with him. He sits one in front of Elijah and one in front of his own chair, but he doesn't sit down. He walks to the door instead and crouches down to rummage in his saddlebags for the book he had brought for Deborah.

Some morbid urge makes him consider consumption, consider the symptoms, and he has to forcibly turn his mind away from those thoughts. He can only imagine watching someone he cares for wasting away in such a fashion, and Elijah is too young to have had to do so. Not that there is ever a good age at which to do it.

He puts the book on the table and sits down. He wonders if there is any way to ask if Elijah needs money without offending him, and doubts it quite sincerely. Never mind, there is money tucked into the back of the book; Elijah will find it eventually, he supposes.

"Lord Byron," he says. "Your mother admired him as a man who lived his life with passion, Elijah. If it pleases you, I would like you to have it."

Elijah looks at the book as if he's never seen one before, his face blank but his eyes betraying him with a telltale shimmer. After a moment he looks at Julien and nods, picking up the glass of whiskey Julien had set in front of him and tilting it against his lips for a small mouthful. Elijah's eyes drop to Julien's hand on the cover of the thick book. Julien's nails are clean and short, his fingers callused but still oddly delicate, despite their obvious strength.

After a moment spent contemplating just what sort of man owns hands like that, Elijah forces himself to meet Julien's gaze once more.

Eljah's hands twist on the table top, then curl around his glass. Lando pushes the book into them, and Elijah accepts it, blunt fingers curling around the cover instead. After a moment, he opens the book, running a fingertip over the words inscribed on the first page.

"I--" Elijah begins, and then takes another sip from his glass of whiskey. Lando watches his throat work beyond what is strictly necessary to swallow the liquor, and looks deliberately away to give Elijah the chance to compose himself. He picks up Elijah's deck and shuffles it idly. "I don't know how to read French," Elijah finally manages, his voice thick and ragged, but seemingly under control.

"I could show you, if you like," he says, then adds, "It isn't even as difficult as the card trick you were working on."

He arcs cards casually from one hand to the other several times, snaps the deck in half and blends it neatly back together. "Spanish, too, if you like, mon ami."

Elijah closes the book and runs his hand over the cover, where Julien's had been moments earlier, imagining his mother stroking then opening the cover, bent over it with the smile that would curl her pretty lips whenever Elijah would spy her with a book.

Elijah's fingers curl around the uneven edges of the pages. He looks at Julien, unsure whether to be grateful or suspicious. There is a familiar ring to Julien's offer which reminds Elijah of Harry.

"Why are you doing this?"

He arches both brows at Elijah, though he's less surprised at the question than he lets himself appear to be. In five months, he guesses Elijah has had to look fairly closely at offers to "help" him. Lando wonders where he is staying, how he's paying for it, but doesn't ask. Not his business. Not yet, anyhow.

"Because I cared for your maman," he says honestly. "And I do not think she would want you to be without friends, Elijah, even if I am not precisely a 'good' influence." He smiles slightly. "Is that not reason enough?"

"I have friends," Elijah counters weakly, knowing as he says it that it's not true.

In the depth of night, ensconced in heavy silk and warm flesh, Harry always says he's Elijah's friend, but Elijah knows better than to trust the hungry glint in Harry's eyes, or the possessive curl of his fingers around Elijah's arms. Elijah takes what Harry gives him (shelter, food, money) but doesn't fool himself for a moment that Harry does it out of the goodness of his heart. He's made it clear before that everything is a transaction, and while Elijah knows that he gets a little distracted sometimes over the way Elijah's body moves under his, he could never consider Harry a true ally.

Cate he knows he can trust, even if she doesn't quite know what to make of him. She's done what she can for him after his mother's death, and he's tried to show gratitude. Sometimes he manages it, although sometimes his words come out sharper than he intends. Whatever the awkward balance between them is, it isn't friendship. Not quite.

No, he's got one friend, and she's sleeping peacefully upstairs, three doors down from the room Elijah had slept in, when his mother had still lived here and Elijah had lived here with her. Liv is the only one Elijah can go to with nothing to offer and nothing to gain, other than warmth and company and compassion. Liv he trusts and loves and cares for more than he can remember ever caring for anyone who wasn't Deborah Wood.

Elijah opens the top cover of the book again and runs dirty fingertips over the inscription there. The porous paper has absorbed and softened the black ink, the loops of Julien's handwriting smooth and indecipherable to Elijah, except for his mother's name at the top of the dedication.

Deborah had a friend. Something like relief suddenly swell in his chest, making tears spring to his eyes again.


	8. Serendipity: Ian, Lando, San Francisco, Early December, 1877

“It’s perfectly all right, my good man,” Ian reassures the tailor, and eases himself down onto a plush armchair. “I can, of course, wait until you have finished with this gentleman.” The tailor, an impeccable small man in a black suit, nods pleasantly and calls to his shopboy to bring some tea.

Ian accepts the proferred cup and sips thoughtfully, watching the tailor bustle with a bespoke fitting for the tall young man standing on the stool. Ian’s view is slightly blocked, and he can only see him from behind, but he appears slightly familiar.

The tailor holds up pieces of cloth against the gent’s shoulder, comparing colours.

”I’m not certain,” the young man says thoughtfully, turning to examine his reflection in the long mirror. _Yes, I do definitely recognise him_ , Ian thinks, and coughs discreetly to attract attention.

”If I may offer an opinion?”

 _Serendipity_.

It had been -- is? -- a word Bills had been fond of using.

It is currently sitting in a plush armchair with elegant brows arched upward in question. “Mr. McKellen,” Lando says. “How good to see you again.” He gestures carefully -- he doesn’t particularly enjoy being stuck with pins -- at his half-clad, pin-ridden state of undress, and smiles. “Excuse me, je vous prie, for not offering to shake your hand.”

The tailor looks a question at him, and Lando nods (of course). He will not be turning down fashion advice from Ian McKellen today. And, if Lando has any luck, charm, or skill, Ian McKellen will not be turning down poker advice from Lando, either. “By all means, an opinion would be most appreciated.”

Lando gives McKellen a broad (and mostly genuine -- he actually does like McKellen, he’s an exemplary player) smile.

”Mr. - or should I say Monsieur? - La Fleur, I do completely understand your predicament,” Ian smiles back widely, “Both with respect to the deployment of social graces, and the difficulty of choosing one’s best colour.” Ian gently places his china cup down on the small table and places his fingertips together thoughtfully.

”I would suggest the blue, perhaps? One should take advantage of one’s youth, before being consigned to the dull colours of old age like myself.” Ian winks and gestures vaguely, knowing full well that he appears anything but dull in his sharp black pinstripes. It is a small gesture of invitation to La Fleur - or as Ian thinks of him privately, Daisy - to preen a little in return.

Or so Ian hopes. He knows the boy can play cards well - very well - knows he has charm in spades, has heard he’s capable of handling himself. And Ian is not so old, not so old at all, to be indifferent to La Fleur’s physical charms, displayed as they are in front of the mirror.

Ian glances away from the fitting, extracts his notebook and map from his breast pocket, and spreads the map out on his knee. It then occurs to him to ask-

”What brings you to this area of San Francisco, Mr La Fleur, besides the exquisite tailoring skills of Mr. Serkis?”

”Julien, sil vous plait,” Lando invites, and takes a moment before answering to regard the blue cloth (it is a deep, rich color, so dark as to almost be black, and very fine) and to give Andy a nod of agreement. Andy beams -- he’s been trying to talk Lando into something brighter than basic black for nearly a year, and appears to be quite enamored of McKellen’s ability to do so with the mere suggestion -- and scurries off with the cloth in his arms, leaving Lando alone with McKellen.

”I’m in town on business, so to speak,” Lando says, which is true, more or less. That the business he is in town on involves McKellen rather deeply, Lando doesn’t mention. “I’m a bit of a nomad, I’m afraid, and prone to wandering as my whimsy takes me.” McKellen glances up briefly from the map on his knees, offering polite attention. “Nothing of any real urgency brings me here; I merely hadn’t been for some time, and wished to become reacquainted with the city. And this is a good place for my particular skills, as you well know.”

Andy returns with a string and begins wrapping in around various parts of Lando’s anatomy (though Lando isn’t sure why he bothers, as Andy probably knows his measurements from memory, as often as he has to come here to re-outfit Julien). McKellen is dividing his attention between the map and Lando, maintaining enough eye contact to be courteous while he continues whatever he is doing with the map.

Lando doesn’t have to feign interest. “Are you planning to travel, if I may presume to inquire?”

Ian laughs genuinely at Julien’s unveiled curiosity, a sign of the boy’s (obviously well-Focused) eye to the main chance. He leans back in the chair, stretching up and cricking his neck before answering.

”I am always planning to travel, young man. One tires easily of the same scenery, even here at the edge of the West.” Ian pauses as Andy attends to Julien’s leg measurements, giving Ian time to consider, to recall what he knows about Julien and his playing history, his encounters with mutual acquaintances.

His occasional disappearances.

Ian decides it’s a calculated risk to treat Julien as straight-up - as straight-up as anyone else in Ian’s acquaintance, he thinks wryly - and besides, Julien happens to be the sort of scenery that Ian certainly does _not_ tire of. A forgiveable weakness, perhaps.

He waits until Julien has turned around on the stool to face him before speaking, wanting to see his face, measure what he can.

”I am searching for a suitable town in the southwest." Ian drums his fingers lightly on the map. “Where gentlemen might meet discreetly for card games.”

Andy, having lost three Italian wool suits to Ian last winter, smiles tightly and turns to write down Julien’s measurements.

”Away from interested authorities,” Ian glances out to the shopfront, a half-smile forming, “and... other riff-raff.”

Yuma is slightly more south than west (is in fact, east of here, but then, nearly everything is) but Lando is fairly sure McKellen had been speaking in generalities.

”Are you then,” he says, and then, to Andy: “Ease up on that, Andy, if you make me bleed, I’ll be sure to return the favor.” Andy merely cocks a brow at him, but he’s not so foolish as to think Lando is joking. Not really. He continues with what he’s doing with a bit more care.

Lando returns his attention to McKellen, who had been watching the exchange with interested eyes. Lando smiles very slightly, with a measure of calculated self-depreciation. McKellen’s smile broadens very slightly, and his eyes flicker down to Lando’s bare chest for an instant before returning to his map.

 _Well_ , Lando thinks, and is both amused and not terribly surprised. _Like that, is it?_

”I’ve traveled quite extensively,”Lando muses aloud. He glances at himself in the mirror, deliberately not looking at McKellen. “I’d be fascinated to hear what kinds of places you might fancy for such a meeting, Monsieur. Perhaps I could interest you in a bite of brunch?”

He swings his gaze around to McKellen and gives the man his best charming scoundrel smile.

 _Ha_ , thinks Ian, _Definitely an eye to the main chance, this one_ , and returns Julien’s smile with a similar, albeit less flashy, expression.

He unclasps his watch from his waistcoat and checks the time - half-past ten already - more from habit rather than any real need to accomodate Julien in his morning schedule, somewhat delighted that the young man has made the suggestion. Ian feels that age and reputation do call for a certain amount of dignified reserve on his parts; it would just not _do_ to invite Julien to a meal.

”That sounds to me a distinct pleasure, Monsieur La Fleur,” Ian replies, folding his map carefully along the creases. “As long as Mr Serkis will have no difficulty rescheduling my fitting for tomorrow, I should be interested to hear of your travels.”

Andy, for whom tomorrow will certainly be some difficulty, closes his eyes so as to roll them privately.

”Of course, Mr McKellen. Same time?”

”That would be splendid, my man.” Ian turns his attention back to Julien, who is shrugging on his shirt. “Did you have a particular place in mind?”

”Ah, but then, this is your city, is it not?” Lando says, allowing his voice to drop into tones slightly more familiar, though still unfailingly polite. He has never actually played McKellen, though he has watched the man play, and he thinks he understands the kind of boundaries Ian lives within, well enough. He is not, however, interested in pressing at those boundaries. Especially not today, when everything comes down to one thing, to Yuma, and he cannot afford to let McKellen’s charm distract him. Nevermind the glittering, intelligent eyes. Lando is well aware that McKellen is an intelligent man. Nevermind the lean, elegant frame, as well.

Lando cannot afford to have Yuma granted to him as a personal ‘favour’ either. He needs this on terms that cannot be revoked at McKellen’s whim, should whatever relationship that might develop between them go sour.

So.

He tucks his shirt carefully into his trousers and allows Andy to help him into his coat. He doesn’t miss McKellen's sharp eyes on the brace of knives as he straps them on, but discourages questions by buttoning his coat over them, concealing them from view. Not that such a thing will stop McKellen, if he really wants to know. Lando is aware of that. McKellen is strong enough, powerful enough, to be able to disregard the consequences of ignoring Lando’s subtle hints.

But Lando doesn’t think he will. McKellen is also polite and urbane. Unless there is a need, McKellen will let him keep his secrets, just as Lando would not presume to inquire about the very slight bulge he can see riding beneath McKellen’s left arm, nearly perfectly concealed by his well-tailoured suit coat.

And really, guns and knives, they speak for themselves. They don’t really require a lot of explanation.

”I’m staying at the Riviera,” Lando says, and smiles a little at his own expensive tastes. He sees amusement flash through McKellen’s eyes, but pretends not to. Let McKellen think him vain; Julien is vain. “I only arrived yesterday, so I’m afraid I’ve not been about lately. I happily submit to your greater knowledge of the city, Monsieur.”

McKellen is seized by the sudden - not displeasurable - picture of Daisy in Lo Fung’s back den, lounging and contented in the poppy-scented haze. Were he not intrigued by La Fleur’s well-disguised, but not totally hidden agenda, he might find it amusing to lead the boy through the rickety streets of Chinatown for a less genteel sort of afternoon.

But perhaps some other time.

For now, it is enough that La Fleur seems to be attentive enough to defer, to _submit_ , although Ian observes the steel blades he straps on and thinks they might reflect their owner’s personality well. La Fleur is hard, glittering, and sharp under the pretty exterior, and Ian is not so dazzled to mistake manners for interest.

Ian snaps his cuffs. “I believe there is an establishment not far from your hotel which serves the most delicious waffles. And coffee, of course.” He relishes La Fleur’s expression, which is wavering between skeptical and indulgent. “Unless of course you don’t partake of sweets before supper?”

“I am at your disposal, monsieur,” Lando says, and sketches a little bow. “Surely if it is to your tastes, I will find it far more than merely adequate.” Which is probably true.

Lando had been on the road until late last night, and he hasn’t eaten anything hot and freshly prepared by hands other than his own in weeks. Whatever McKellen chooses will be fine; Lando is merely a passable camp cook, and if he can eat his own cooking, he can eat anything.

He slides by McKellen quickly enough to get the door open for him, and grins at the man’s arched brows and smile of thanks.

It is early enough that the boardwalk is still roomy, not crowded with masses of people, mostly unwashed. It is dusty, though, as it has been a dry season. As soon as they are outside, the inevitable layer of fine grit settles on their clothing. McKellen brushes absently at it, his air one of a man long used to the dust. Lando ignores it, for now, and will sneer at it later, in private, when he is forced to spend the last minutes of his day brushing the worst of it away with a horsehair brush, as it is currently the only suit that Julien owns, and Julien does not venture out looking less than immaculate.

”Have you been in the city long, Mister La Fleur,” McKellen asks politely. Lando has allowed him to take the lead position, though in reality he is a bare half step ahead, in deference to the fact that McKellen is the one who knows where they are going. Also, it keeps Lando’s face out of his easy line of sight. It’s a precaution, and one he likely doesn’t need, as it has been a long time since Lando has had his poker face fail. Still, all precautions are unnecessary until proven otherwise, and it’s best not to tempt fate. McKellen is astute in all the best ways, which happen to be all the worst ways for someone in Lando’s position; that is, someone who wants something from the man, and doesn’t want him to know it.

”Julien, I beg you. I rode in only last night,” Lando replies, feigned nonchalance and faux accent intact. “I had thought to try my hand at one of the riverboats on the Colorado. Alas, I found the company not to my liking.”

A blatant lie. Lando _had_ been close to the Colorado, but he hadn’t even seen a riverboat in passing. He is a good liar. He’s had lots of practice.

Ian doesn’t bite, although he longs to know exactly what kind of company constitutes ‘not to my liking’. If he were anything like himself at that age - and Ian looks closely, hazards that La Fleur is in his middling-twenties - then the only kind of bad company is none at all.

Elizabeth’s family would have been horrified, scandalised at the disparate sorts of ‘company’ Ian had kept when they first arrived in San Francisco. Ian almost laughs out loud, thinking of the lengths to which he went to prevent his worlds colliding. At least Elizabeth, bless her, had had a sense of humour about these things, had sense enough to keep a decent perspective on the occasional mess he landed them in, and had discretion enough to know who to trust.

Ian glances over at La Fleur as they walk along, almost companionably - although it is clear that something is itching in the air, but that can wait, wait for coffee and the ability to look La Fleur in the eyes - and looks for a wedding ring. That he doesn’t see one means nothing, even for a European man, out in the west.

"Are you married, Julien?" Ian asks, leading them through the small morning market throng around the fountain.

For a moment, Lando is too surprised to laugh. Not ten minutes before, McKellen had been eyeballing him as though he were a particularly mouth-watering bit of pastry, and now he is asking if Lando is married? There is something wrong with the order in which the two had occurred, he thinks, lips quirking into a wry smile.

McKellen glances over his shoulder in that moment, and catches the smile on his face. Lando broadens it into a grin, and shrugs with one shoulder. “Non, monsieur. I am not what most ladies consider to be ‘the marrying type’.”

He thinks of Cate for a moment, possibly the only woman in the world with which Lando could be said to have an actual ‘relationship’ -- albeit a mostly platonic one -- and of what Cate would say if she’d heard someone ask Lando that question. He is suddenly rather grateful Cate is not here.

”I confess, I have never been much tempted by matrimony,” he says. “I find my freedom a comfort, and have not much inclination toward a... settled lifestyle.”

Which is completely true. Almost uncomfortably so.

McKellen stops in front of a smallish shop and opens the door for Lando. There are brightly colored curtains in the windows, and inside it smells like pastry and strong coffee. Lando takes a deep breath of the sweet-scented air, and smiles with genuine appreciation. Yes, this will be immeasurably better than anything Lando has eaten in the past few weeks.

He beams at McKellen as the man passes him, leading him toward the table that he clearly prefers -- and possibly frequents, as there is a crisply folded newspaper already awaiting him on it, along with a single teacup and a sealed envelope -- and McKellen smiles back.

Lando does not glance at the envelope, though he wonders about it, of course. By the time they have seated themselves, a pretty, pink-cheeked woman a few years older than Lando is already placing a cup in front of him.

”You’re a bit early, Ian,” she says, some combination of scolding and indulgent. “I’m afraid I’m not ready for you. Will you be taking coffee or tea?”

“I think we will be having coffee, Rose, and when you’re ready, some pancakes, if you would be so kind.” Ian smiles broadly and comfortably, grateful that he’s not one of those men who develop a belly as they age. To give up Rose’s sweet pancakes would not bear thinking about. “I’m assuming that’s fine with you, Julien?” He has decided to drop the formal address to La Fleur.

”Yes, of course.” La Fleur turns to Rose. “That’s very good of you, madame.” Rose gives him a wink, Ian notices, before dipping her head and trotting out to the kitchen.

Ian glances at the newspaper briefly, folds the envelope inside it, and places the paper on the spare chair, dismissive. Those are things that can be attended to another time, he thinks, because right now he wants to know La Fleur’s agenda - it has become apparent he has one, he is too polite and measured, too quick with glances that gauge Ian’s reactions.

Ian reaches inside his breast pocket and brings out the map and notebook again, and spreads the map on the table between them just as Rose returns with a coffeepot and an extra cup. She hovers, unsure of where to place things.

”Just put them here, Rose,” Ian gestures, “on Utah.” She pours their coffee quickly.

”Never liked the territory, myself,” La Fleur comments with a grin.

Ian laughs. “Neither I, my boy, neither I.” As he takes he first mouthful of the coffee - smooth and strong, the second reason he keeps coming back here - he is suddenly impatient, unwilling to catfoot around any more. He places his cup back in its saucer and looks at La Fleur directly.

”What is it you think I can do for you, Julien?”

Lando has the momentary urge to curse, and refrains. He shouldn’t be surprised; he had known McKellen was sharp.

Nevertheless, he is surprised.

He doesn’t look away from McKellen’s direct gaze, however. It is obviously past the point where dissembling will do any good, and he has shown McKellen enough, however unwittingly, for one day.

His tongue, however, seems not to want to form words. He has never spoken of Yuma to another soul outside of Yuma itself. It had always been too dangerous, too potentially destructive to his secrets, and now that he needs to, he balks. He is aware that such hesitation is revealing in itself, and he knows damn well that McKellen is the sort of man who will see it, and understand it as a weakness, but for long moments, he cannot overcome his habitual secrecy, his need to preserve his one and only place of sanctuary.

He reaches out and taps a finger lightly on the shaded outline of the Arizona Territory, and doing so is enough to relieve some of the tightness in his throat and chest, returning his powers of speech.

When he speaks, his voice is deeper than he means it to be, more intent. He chooses not to attempt to lighten it. “There is a certain lady of my acquaintance that resides in Yuma, Monsieur.” He moves his finger southward and rests the tip on the area just north of the Mexican border and east of the Colorado River. “Just here.”

For a moment, he studies McKellen’s face. It is carefully neutral, a poker face, but his eyes are bright and interested.

He is revealing too much of himself, he knows it. He is showing too clearly that this is important to him, when Julien is not a man that holds much of anything to be important. His own neutral expression, the one that is usually so easy for him, is frustratingly out of his reach.

But it can’t be helped, and it’s too late now even if he _could_ recover it, so he continues.

”She runs an establishment that I frequent, when I visit there.” He removes his finger from the map and sits back in his chair. He doesn’t look away from McKellen’s steady regard, though he wants to. “This lady’s position in Yuma is... delicate. If her establishment were to host high-stakes games, Mr. McKellen -- games that were overseen by men with a certain amount of prestige and authority of the financial persuasion -- her position would be made somewhat less... precarious.”

Ordinarily of a cheerful disposition, Ian is in an uncharacteristically good mood this morning, and so he can’t help it (even though he knows he should, good lord, the boy will be mortified) when he laughs out loud, feels his shoulders shake and he glad he’s not holding his coffee.

Almost immediately he composes himself, because there is a slight flush on Daisy’s cheeks, and Ian is not so confident that he commands enough respect from this young man to ignore the knives strapped to his chest, barely two feet away.

”I beg your pardon, Julien,” Ian says quite sincerely, “I had you pegged as some ordinary scoundrel who was looking to,” - and here Ian smiles at La Fleur’s expression, relief and indignation both apparent - “swindle me, rob me blind-“ he trails off, pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head. “But I didn’t expect your motivations to be quite so... admirable.” He smiles, gets a wan half-grin in return.

Ian looks down at the map, down at Yuma, and traces the railway lines east, west, and north. The connections are good, very good. He looks up at La Fleur, who is watching him steadily, anxiety seemingly ebbed away. Ian is still terribly amused - _a certain lady of my acquaintance_ \- sounding so unwittingly guarded, so protective, and he files that bit of information away for later. He picks up his pen and writes the map co-ordinates in his notebook.

”Hotels? Local law?” Ian taps his pen. He is interested, very much so; in the town, and in what La Fleur might be able to do for him.

  
“Three hotels,” Lando says. “Two very good ones.” He makes a flicking gesture with his fingertips. “Local law is negligible, the sheriff currently in residence is ineffective. There is the fort across the river however, that keeps things more or less quiet. Brawls and riots are not the norm. It is...” he pauses to think on what words he wants here. McKellen sips at his coffee and continues to look interested, relaxed. He is smiling, and Lando is reassured in spite of himself. He can’t help feel like this is too easy, like he should be more wary of this man, but... he isn’t. He simply isn’t. McKellen feels... honest. It is not something Lando is accustomed to coming across in a person. “It is a good balance, I think,” he finishes finally. “It is quiet, people mind their business. It’s position geographically is... convenient.”

He sits back and falls silent when the woman returns with plates of steaming, fragrant pancakes. She arranges little dishes of fruit compote between them, along with powdered sugar, and rich-smelling maple syrup. Lando takes advantage of the distraction to try and order his thoughts.

McKellen beams and flirts with the proprietress, his elegant, long fingered hands gesturing expressively. The sunlight from the window glints on the man’s left hand ( _wedding band_ , Lando’s mind recognizes it, and he’s not sure if he’s surprised or not), and gleams in his cheerful eyes. He seems neither impatient nor particularly curious to hear Lando’s information on Yuma, and Lando wonders if the man has already made up his mind.

Surely it is not going to be this easy?

When the woman moves away with a laugh and a flip of her hair, Lando catches McKellen’s eye deliberately and holds it. “The establishment is a Cat House, Monsieur,” he says. “But it is not a place lacking in style or class, and the proprietress is a lady of good taste and intelligence. She would make an exemplary hostess.”

 _Perfect_ Ian thinks, although he does not say it. Instead he remarks, “How very useful to have one’s pleasures concentrated under one roof,” and dismisses the matter by eating a large mouthful of pancake.

He wonders if La Fleur has any idea how easy it is to guess at his situation—and it is obviously a matter of some importance, debts of not just money but honour at stake. He looks hard at La Fleur. Probably some kind of affair, as well. No matter. The boy might fancy himself beholden to Ian in future, and that may be useful.

Ian lets the silence settle for a second, to see if La Fleur will volunteer any more information, but his companion is tucking himself into his food, somewhat ravenously.

”Monsieur La Fleur, if I may take your word on the details of your town—“ and here Ian stresses _your town_ , watches carefully the flicker across La Fleur’s face—“I should be quite happy to have been spared the arduous task of mapreading.”

Ian drains his coffee, waves the empty pot towards Rose. “I’m not too fussed about any other details. I merely require the genial company of men who do not mind me winning large amounts of money from them.” He flashes a bright grin at La Fleur. “I hope you’ll care to lose a few games at our club while you’re here?”

Even though he’d almost been expecting it, Lando has to take a moment to let that sink in. McKellen is smiling at him (amusement, mostly, but there is a knowing look around the eyes, which Lando does not care for -- he’s made it his business _not_ to be known -- but can do little about), and Lando finds himself nodding.

”Oui, Monsieur,” he says, and sends a fleeting prayer of thanks to whatever God is responsible for his talent at mimicry, and the ability that lets his tongue remember it is Julien when his brain does not. “I am honored at the invitation.”

McKellen nods, mouth full.

”I will provide you with the information necessary to get into contact with the locale I have in mind,” Lando says. “If you like, I can arrange for the lady to contact you?”

”That would be eminently suitable,” McKellen agrees. “I should like to see the accomodations, before anything can be decisively agreed upon, of course. But if everything is as you have said, I believe a successful association has been reached.”

As much as Lando would like to be able to claim a part in the ‘association’, he really cannot. “You understand I have no stake in the establishment, monsieur. It belongs entirely to the lady. I am only... providing her with what assistance I am capable of, within my limited abilities.”

McKellen gives him a long look, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin which he does not need. He is a meticulously neat eater. “I understand, Mister La Fleur,” he says, and doesn’t smile.

Lando is uncomfortably afraid that McKelled does, indeed, understand. But there is nothing he can do about that, either. So he nods. “Tres bon,” Lando says, and mostly means it. “It is agreed.”


End file.
